Mr. Speaker, I move—

1. (a) the expenditure of moneys by or on behalf of candidates at an election;
2. (b) the improvement of the procedures that are followed at voting by absent voters; and
3. (c) the elimination of problems experienced when holding House of Assembly and Provincial Council elections on the same day, the Committee to have power to take evidence and call for papers and to have leave to bring up a Bill amending the said Act.

Agreed to.

Mr. Speaker, I move—

Agreed to.

Mr. Speaker, last night when the debate was adjourned, I was telling the House of the failure of this Government to curb its own spending rate whilst in fact urging the public to do just so, and I was talking about the hardships that have been caused thereby. I had told the House of the hardships which are being caused to civil servants, to pensioners and to others with fixed earnings, and how badly they had been affected by the Government’s actions and its failure to curb inflation. But, Sir, there is another group of people who have been directly affected by the Government’s failure. I refer specifically to the landowners in the Eastern Cape, and some of them in Natal, who are affected by the Government’s consolidation proposals. Many of these people have been misled by the Government, and particularly by assurances given, I understand in good faith, by the ex-Deputy Minister of Bantu Development, now the Minister of Water Affairs. Many people are today in serious financial trouble because of Government promises that have been broken. Having accepted the Government’s intentions in good faith, they offered their farms. Valuations were made and in some cases offers were made by the department. Ex-Deputy Minister Raubenheimer announced that they would all be paid out by December 1975, particularly those in the Peddie area in the Ciskei.

When did I announce that?

Almost all of those farmers allowed their farming operations to run down. They held dispersal sales and sold their equipment and none of them are operating at full capacity. Many of them have committed themselves to other enterprises. Then, all of a sudden, like a bolt out of the blue, in September all supplies of money were cut off. I do not blame the ex-Deputy Minister. I believe that he has been a pawn in the hands of the two Ministers concerned with economic affairs, namely the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Economic Affairs, and especially the Minister of Finance. It was his failure adequately to plan and to control the fiscal affairs of the country that resulted in this situation. All those people today face hardships. Many of them face bankruptcy and ruin because they have committed themselves. Then, of course, there is a ripple affect because others in turn have committed themselves on the promises of this Government. Surely the promise of a Government should be considered as gilt-edged. When will the people of South Africa learn not to trust this Nationalist Government? [Interjections.] One could almost say that this was a fraud which has been perpetrated on these people by the Government.

Sir, so far I have dealt only with the collective responsibility of the Cabinet. What about each of those gentlemen sitting there as individuals? What has their personal contribution to the battle against inflation been?

Ask them about television sets.

Yes, which one of them gave their television set back? They have all been given television sets at Government expense, and I would like to know which of them has given his set back. Not one of them, so how much of a sacrifice have they made in the fight against inflation? You will remember, Sir, that when there was a scare over fuel, at the time of petrol restrictions, a tremendous song and dance was made about Cabinet Ministers driving around in so-called small motor-cars. They put their big Cadillacs away and went riding around in Mercedes 350s and Jaguar XJs, tiny “Jags”. That is what they were running around in. What is the position today, when we are fighting inflation? All the black Cadillacs have been dusted off and have been brought out, and they are all riding around in them today. That is the sort of contribution they are making.

That is a lie.

Order!

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw it and say it is untrue.

There you are, Sir; that is their reaction. That is the reaction one gets from the Government as soon as they have to bear criticism for what they are not doing while urging others to do something. Everybody else must pull in their belts and tighten another notch, but not the Ministers of this inflated Government. Sir, what about the Nationalist administration in the Orange Free State which, in this year of inflation, spends R98 000 in buying a new house for an MEC? And then, in addition, they spend another R114 000 in renovating another MEC’s house. This is what one gets from a Nationalist administration in the Orange Free State. One has only got to come to Natal to see that the members of the executive committee of Natal do not even get houses at Government expense. That is the contribution which we are making, as opposed to the contribution they are making towards the fight against inflation.

There is yet another aspect. What about the prices the Government controls? Why does the hon. the Minister of Economic Affairs allow the continuation of retail price maintenance in regard to petrol? Why does he not allow Raymond Ackerman to sell petrol at ½ cent per litre cheaper if he wants to? He puts the big squeeze on petrol companies to stop him doing his bit towards fighting inflation by giving the public petrol at ½ cent a litre cheaper. What about tyres? Why does the hon. the Minister allow certain practices to carry on there? He wields the big stick against others, and I agree that he should. Retail price maintenance is an iniquitous practice and should be stamped out in this country in respect of all items. The same thing happened when the ex-Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Uys, would not allow supermarkets to sell bread at a discount price. This is the type of thing the public can expect from this Government; that is the way they fight inflation.

The hon. member for Constantia mentioned that there has been a reduction, a flattening out, in the inflation rate over the last three months. However, I want to warn the hon. the Minister not to take comfort from this because this is only a temporary phase. What has been the position? With the first flush of enthusiasm for the programme of action against inflation, many manufacturers have held back price increases. In addition to this, there has been a tremendous price war—the hon. the Minister should know this—particularly amongst the large distributors of foodstuffs. However, that price war is now over. It was only as a result of those two factors that the Government has had the success it has in the last two to three months. The hon. member for Constantia has warned that the dam is about to break, but I would like to say that it has already broken. If one looks at the list of articles of which the prices have risen in this month of January, one sees that the prices of paper products, detergents, toiletries, cosmetics, shaving equipment, rice, tinned fruit and jams, tea, coffee and motor-cars and spares have risen. These are all things which the hon. the Minister should have been able to do something about. What is our position going to be in February when we are going to get even more price increases? We should also not forget that the effects of the massive devaluation have not yet been felt; they are still coming.

I hope the hon. the Minister is not taking too much comfort from what has been achieved over the last few months. What has been achieved is the result of the direct participation of the public and of the public’s contribution towards the fight against inflation. What this Government has done is not apparent. I do not believe that they have done anything, and I do not believe that they want to help the public fight the war against inflation.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Pietermaritzburg South has been spreading his usual collection of political gossip here. He even asked when the public would learn not to trust the National Party any more. The hon. member admitted that the public, the voters, do trust the National Party. I want to tell him that the public and the voters trust the National Party because they have more common sense than he has.

One of the most interesting events in this debate was the contributions which came from the Progressive Reformist Party. The leader of this party asked for Parliament to be summoned in December because he had serious reservations about the way this Government had handled the crisis in Angola. During his speech on Tuesday the hon. member came up with a long list of accusations against the Cabinet and the Government about the way in which this affair had been handled. He was supported by the hon. member for Rondebosch. However, the climax was the speech of the hon. member for Pinelands, who is not here at the moment. He referred to people in South Africa—and from this I assume that he is aware of these people and possibly has some of them as his friends—who were looking north and did not know whether they saw a friend or an enemy.

In the situation in which we are today concerning Angola, there can be no doubt as to which north he means when he looks north. Nor can there be any doubt as to whom he considers to be an enemy or a possible friend of some people in South Africa. The power in the north is an atheistic and totalitarian power which also has its eye upon the south. Apparently this does not worry the hon. member for Pinelands, or at least some of his friends. He is prepared to refer to that power as a possible friend of some people in South Africa. The hon. member goes further to protest against the fact that only Whites are involved in our defence operations. Fortunately the hon. member is prepared to accept that our borders have to be defended. The hon. member says that there are only Whites involved in our defence operations and he says this in spite of the fact that the hon. the Minister of Defence made it very clear that also Coloured people are involved in the defence of the borders. He even mentioned the number of Coloured people. The hon. the Minister said that the Coloured Corps were preparing itself to serve in this respect. The hon. member ignores these facts and complains because only White people are defending South Africa. Instead of standing up and thanking those people who are prepared to give their lives to defend Black and White, he complains that only Whites are defending South Africa. That hon. member did not appreciate the gravity of our situation, or rather he does not want to appreciate it.

The most interesting contribution on the part of the Progressive Reformist Party was that of the hon. member for Yeoville. In contrast with the negative and derogatory contributions of the other members of that party, the hon. member for Yeoville, in broad, general terms, made an ardent, patriotic speech. That hon. member spoke most enthusiastically about the defence of South Africa. He is not concerned whether White or Black people are defending South Africa; he is concerned about the essence of the problem which has not yet been solved; he is concerned about the defence of our borders and about the safety of South Africa. The hon. member suggests that the African countries should come together and stand together so that the people of this Continent can decide their own future. What is more, the hon. member says that we owe it to our defence force to supply them with the best and the most up-to-date weapons. The hon. member knows that this costs a great deal of money today and he therefore suggests that the Government should arrange for a defence bond issue. The hon. member’s speech was quite patriotic. But I wonder whether the other hon. members in those benches agree with that speech. I watched them while he was speaking. The hon. member for Yeoville is not here now, but I would like to tell him that his friends did not applaud him when he had finished. I wonder whether the hon. member for Johannesburg North, who is not here either, but who raised such a hue and cry about our defence expenditure last year, would support the hon. member for Yeoville when he pleaded that we should arm our people as best as we possibly can. I wonder whether the hon. member would endorse that patriotic speech. That is rather a small party and half of its members have not even been elected by the voters as such. It is already clear that there is a division in their ranks and that this concerns patriotism. I would like to tell the hon. member for Yeoville—even though he is not here today—that we have come to know him in many respects as a person who, although we differ from him, after all is said and done is as patriotic as possible. I want to warn him that he should not let himself be overpowered by people in that party who are less patriotic or who do not place South Africa first. [Interjections.] There the hon. member for Pinelands is coming now. I know the hon. member as an honest person; indeed he followed a very honourable profession in his day. I wonder whether the hon. member would tell me if he agrees with the very patriotic speech made yesterday by the hon. member for Yeoville.

Yes.

Does the hon. member also agree that we must increase our defence expenditure to supply our people on the border with the best equipment possible?

Yes, I said so myself.

We will remember this when we deal with the Budget later this year. But they have short memories.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. members in those benches do not know what their standpoints were last year. During the course of this debate, quite a few speakers tried, by referring to the Angola situation, to draw a parallel with our own internal setup in South Africa. The hon. member for Hillbrow also tried to draw lessons from the Angola situation. He said, among other things—

He continued—

Then he continues to try and describe this policy of South Africa as a constellation, a whole series of discriminatory measures, laws and customs. I want to come back later to what this hon. member calls the essence of our policy. I would also like to learn a few lessons from the Angola situation. The first lesson which we can all learn from the Angola situation is that the myth of a unified Africa has finally been destroyed. This has always been a myth. As we know, a myth is a story with the appearance of reality. African unity has always been a myth, but Angola has finally destroyed that myth. Angola was the catalyst for a new polarization in Africa. It was a polarization which took place around the following poles, namely on the one hand those African states who found it expedient to serve specific ideological principles; those countries who found it expedient to serve a specific ideology; countries who were prepared to allow outside intervention in Africa provided that such intervention meant distribution and promotion of those particular ideologies. On the other side of this polarization are those African states who believe that African states should have the freedom to decide about their own future and to arrange their internal affairs themselves without outside intervention. And this, Mr. Speaker, is how the hon. the Minister of Defence formulated the standpoint of South Africa very neatly when he said that our involvement in Angola is to protect the freedom of the people so that they can decide themselves what they want to do with that freedom.

The second lesson which the events in Angola have taught us, is the inability, or rather the unwillingness, of the Western powers to oppose communistic aggression in Africa. This has nothing to do with the utter ridiculous argument of the member for Hill-brow, who said—

I wonder whether the hon. member thought that if the United Party—and may heaven preserve us—was in power, the Western powers would have queued up to oppose communistic aggression in Africa? For the West, that is not what it is all about. The fact that South Africa wishes to defend its borders and that South Africa maintains a specific standpoint with regard to Angola is not what is at issue. This has nothing to do with South Africa. I think we should rather learn from this that it has already been proved many times that the leadership crisis which has been going on for several years in the West is developing into an existence crisis for the West. One cannot be too optimistic about that existence crisis, especially not in the light of the purposeful Russian expansion in Africa and in the rest of the world.

After Angola, it ought to be clear to all African countries that the struggle against communism and communistic imperialism in Africa will have to be waged without any significant help from the West. This is the lesson which those countries who are next in line will have to learn. This is the lessen which Zaire and the other countries in the north will have to learn through Zambia, particularly, perhaps after the announcement in this morning’s newspapers. Zambia and South Africa will also have to learn that in this struggle we shall have to rely on ourselves and upon each other to an increasing extent.

This brings me to a last point I would like to make on Angola and this was also briefly mentioned by the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Angola has illustrated our commitment to Africa in a spectacular way. We are fighting at Ruacana and on the border of South Africa for the freedom of Black and White people. We are prepared to fight for the freedom of the peoples of Southern Africa. We would like to join Africa in tackling the challenges of Africa. We would like to join the struggle with Africa against hunger, disease, underdevelopment and illiteracy. This we would also like to do within the borders of our country, namely to face the future with White, Brown and Black people and build it so that everyone, all people, all nations in Southern Africa, may live together in peace. And now the hon. member for Hillbrow says that we cannot move ahead, that we cannot deal with these problems, because we are caught up in the web of our own policy. Our policy is only apartheid, the same apartheid, he says, which we had in 1948. The hon. member deals very superficially with the principle of apartheid. He does not give us any clear definition because I think he is afraid that hon. members on that side may also be accused of being caught up in apartheid. Indeed, they also stand for separate schools and separate voters’ rolls. They also live in separate residential areas. The hon. member for Hillbrow says that this policy, which he referred to in vague terms, is still precisely the same. The hon. member has tried to play a very simple game. He asks: “Do you agree?” and then he wants us to answer: “Yes.” He asks: “Is the policy still the same?” and if we answer “yes”, he wants to go to the cities and conjure up the spectres of the past. If we say “No”, he travels through the country and say that the National Party itself admits that its policy has changed. It is a very simple game, but the hon. member, who is an intelligent person, has forgotten one truth, and that is that the principles of change and of identity do not clash. In his day, the hon. member for Hillbrow—if I may use such a simple example to bring it home to him—once lay in a cradle himself. As a little boy he ran around barefoot in the Free State before he began to follow the wrong course. Sir, is that a different person sitting over there? Yes, it is apparently a different person who has undergone many changes externally, but in essence remains the same person. Enormous changes on the one hand, but identity on the other. This is exactly what the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, discovered years ago when he said there is enormous growth potential in a small oak tree. The small oak tree becomes the giant of the forest. It is an enormous change, and yet it is maintenance of identity. It is the same, still an oak tree. This is also true of the policy of the National Party. It has an enormous potential for growth, for development.

But it remains apartheid.

The hon. member should only take note of what is happening around him. Changes are being made. Major changes have been initiated by this party and this Government and still more major changes are going to come. And yet it is still the same policy. Why is it the same policy? It is the same policy because it is still rooted in the same principle, the same philosophy of life. I will speak as simply as I can, and possibly there will be hon. members on that side of the House who may understand it. They will understand that the National Party, which has brought about and initiated these great changes, is still operating according to the same principle of life, the same philosophy. What is that philosophy? Let me put it to you again. The National Party believes that the individual does not represent the absolute and highest value in life, that the individual does not represent the only value in life. The philosophy of the liberal school, which is also the philosophy of the hon. members in the benches of the Progressive Reformist Party, is that they are convinced that the individual represents an absolute value, the highest value. Therefore the right of the individual, the freedom of the individual, the possessions of the individual, are raised above all other values. The individual is placed first. For the Progrefs and the people who support this liberal tradition, the individual is the highest entity. Their philosophy is that every individual, every human being, has his own value, his own merit, and that every person has a right of his own which is above everything else. All other values are secondary: Your language is secondary, your religion is secondary and the nation to which you belong is secondary. All these things are secondary. Only the individual is primary. The individual represents the highest value. Therefore these people are always concerned with one issue, and that is human rights. Their whole attitude centres around the human being, and therefore they only plead for human rights. Sir, we on this side of the House also attach great value to the individual. We also believe in human rights. We also believe that the individual has a right and a freedom, but we believe that there is another aspect to this. We believe that the individual achieves complete fulfilment in his own community in that national community which he forms part. The human being only becomes a human being in the true sense of the word through other people. He is only truly a human being through his family, his community, and through the nation to which he belongs. Gabriël Marcel has written a very interesting book about the people who, after the First World War, were deprived of this framework of family, of community, of nation, and he pointed out that these people also lost their humanity in this way. Therefore members on this side of the House believe not only in human rights, but also in national rights. It is because we respect human rights, but also want to maintain national rights, that we believe, within the complicated ethnic set-up of South Africa, that both the individual with his rights and the national community with its rights can best be served through a policy of separate freedoms, of separate development.

What about the Coloureds?

The same holds true for them. [Interjections.] Therefore one expects the hon. member for Hillbrow to be far more articulate when he refers to concepts such as discrimination which supposedly make up the essence of our policy. The concepts of “discrimination” and “differentiation” are determined by one’s philosophy of life. If one adopts the line of thought represented by the liberal school, by the Progrefs, then one must consider any form of differentiation as discrimination. Then every form of differentiation is discrimination. Therefore it is also discriminatory to reserve a swimming pool for one population group only. It is discriminatory for your Leader to get up at a congress and say: “We believe discrimination should be removed completely, but don’t forget our schools will remain White!” And it is also discriminatory in terms of that party’s point of view if one gives the franchise only to a particular selected section of the population. In terms of the standpoints of that party, their qualified franchise is also a form of discrimination. In this respect the Prime Minister himself said in one of his famous speeches at Marico on 16 November 1974, that if one adopts the standpoint of multi-racialism, one should have the courage and the conviction to maintain that multi-racialism to the end, and he went further to show how one cannot reserve certain things, such as schools and other things, but that you have to go all the way. But if one proceeds from an individual view and also an ethnic view, if one maintains human rights, and also maintain ethnic rights, one is able to make a distinction between nations without discriminating. You can distinguish, you can differentiate. There is much grumbling about the concept of differentiation, as if this is just another word for discrimination. Of course one is able to discriminate between nations if one proceeds from the concept of ethnic rights. It is true that those distinguishing measures should be of such a nature that they do not affect the dignity of people and other ethnic groups. They should not be petty and hurtful and should not merely seek to maintain traditional ways of life which have become part of our customs, but they should be aimed at protecting the people and the rights of the people without ignoring or belittling the rights of the individual.

Therefore, Sir, this party has committed itself in terms of its philosophy of life, which I have already referred to, to move away from discrimination. But it must be born in mind that there are many practical measures, and I call them practical and not ideological as hon. members on the other side prefer to call them, measures which are purely aimed at avoiding friction between people and population groups. In his speech at Marico the hon. the Prime Minister said (translation)—

There are, therefore, measures to avoid friction between people and population groups. Many of these measures ought to become unnecessary and vanish in the course of time. In so far as these precautions may be discriminatory in nature, we will continue to view them with criticism. They will not and cannot be maintained merely because there are people who presume that it will cause friction if they are removed. The great majority of our people in South Africa, White, Black and Brown are often far more matured and restrained on the level of human decency than we are prepared to accept. But the elimination of discrimination also falls on a terrain where one has to act prudently and with responsibility, as this Government has done. There are customs which have arisen traditionally and which are deeply imbedded in the life-style of our people. Hasty and irresponsible action in this respect could create a climate in which one feels uncertain and threatened, and on the long-term could bedevil rather than promote relationships in South Africa. But since the Government respect human rights and also ethnic rights, it has committed itself to granting each ethnic group a say over its own people, to granting each population group the right to decide its own future.

We often hear the hon. members of the Opposition arguing that the non-White people in South Africa should be given a share in South Africa, something to defend. The hon. member for Yeoville concluded his speech with this statement yesterday. Unfortunately I do not have a copy of it here, but he said we should give these people something to defend. But this is exactly what this Government wants to do. We want to give them a share in South Africa. We want to give them a say in the affairs of their own people. Let me furnish one example. [Interjections.] Do hon. members think that the citizens of the Transkei, which is soon to become independent, do not have a special share in South Africa, do not have a special interest to defend? [Interjections.] No, they are far better off within that framework than they would be, in terms of the policy of the Progressive Reformist Party, as a minority group among other minority groups which would continually be involved in the struggle for power in South Africa.

No, Sir, the answer to South Africa’s problem is not only to be found along the lines of human rights, but also along the lines of national rights. This side of the House has a mandate from the voters of South Africa in this regard. This Government has committed itself to do this and will do it to the best of its ability and for the development of all the peoples in South Africa and for peace and prosperity in this country.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Johannesburg West made a spirited effort to try to tell us when apartheid is no longer apartheid. I do not think he really succeeded. He also told us about the intentions of the Government to eliminate discrimination. I think the time has come when it should no longer be an intention but an actual fact. In the time allotted to me in this debate I wish to deal specifically with matters relating to the Coloured people, but before I do so I want to react to a speech made during the closing hours of yesterday’s debate. I refer to the speeches made by the hon. members for Parys and Krugersdorp. The hon. member for Parys claimed that Mr. Sonny Leon, leader of the Labour Party, had said that in view of the fact that both the United Party and the Progrefs consulted freely with that party and with himself before the major debates in this House, he claimed the Official Opposition was now the Labour Party. I want to say that we in the United Party consult freely with all sections of the Coloured community, with professional people, academic people, trade union leaders and everybody involved in their community.

And everybody rejects you.

We shall also continue to do so. However, one of the problems that is arising, because the Coloured people do not have representation in the forum that makes the laws which govern their lives, there is a tendency for the debate about the Coloured people to be taking place outside of Parliament, and over that I have no control. This is a tendency in terms of which Mr. Leon’s claim may, in fact, be valid. The hon. member for Parys also claimed that a political party must be prepared to face the consequences of its policy. We in these benches are prepared to face up to the consequences of our policy, and it would be in the best interests of South Africa if our policy in fact became the policy of this Government and this country. I want to remind that hon. member that he must face up to the consequences of his policy and in respect of his party, his policy and the Government…

Tell us about the ultimate consequences of your policy.

If the hon. member would just sit patiently and listen he would learn something for a change. If that hon. member follows his party’s policy dogmatically—and if I may say so he appears to equate patriotism with following the policies of the Nationalist Party—then he must realize that the consequence of his policy is that the duly elected representatives of two million Coloured people are denied representation in the highest authority in the land which makes the laws and governs the lives of those people. That is the consequence he must face up to. There is no alternative. [Interjection.] I will not read it; you must just listen. That is your duty. The consequences of the policy of the Government which he must face up to, are those consequences which are creating the troubles this new Minister must now attempt to rectify. Nobody can deny that there are troubles in the relationship between the Coloured people and the Government and if we are not prepared to take note of this, I think we are blind to the realities of the South African situation. The Leader of the Opposition, in his motion before this House, highlights the fact that the Government’s policies have failed to unite the peoples of South African in a common loyalty. I want to congratulate my hon. leader for the statesmanlike way in which he motivated that statement here. Not only did he do a service to South Africa, but he also did a service to this House by highlighting this fact. I want to support my hon. leader in his contention, with particular reference to the Coloured people. I take it all of us in this House and in South Africa are deeply concerned about the future well-being and security of South Africa, and at such a time there is no doubt in my mind—and in the minds of the hon. members of my party—that one of the cardinal issues on which our security depends is the promotion of better race relations and understanding between races in South Africa. Our security depends overwhelmingly on creating a sense of belonging, a sense of involvement and a feeling of participation on the part of every member of every race group in this country. It must surely be the knowledge that they have a stake in this land that will promote the patriotism to which my leader so rightly referred. In this regard I have a feeling that perhaps we are failing the Coloured people. Above all else, there must be the realization and the acceptance of the fact that the democratic ideals and the free capitalistic enterprise system to which we all subscribe in this House offer more to the people of this land than any other ideology which may be threatening the country at this time. In the light of the above, it is with grave concern that I have to say that I sense and experience a worsening of relationships between the Coloured people and the White people in South Africa. I do not say this in a sense of wanting to whip up feelings, but I think that if we, as members of this House, do not take cognizance of this fact, we are failing South Africa at a very critical stage of its history. In this regard I think it is imperative that every member in this House, including the hon. Minister, in fact all of us who are concerned about the future of our country, must make an objective survey of the events and circumstances which have led up to the worsening of race relations in South Africa. I think that if we were to do that, we would find that one of the main reasons is that the Coloured people do not believe they are getting a square deal in respect of their citizenship in the land to which they belong.

Before I deal with the main subject matter of my speech, I want to take this opportunity of congratulating the Minister on his appointment to the Cabinet. I am referring to the Minister of Coloured, Rehoboth and Nama Relations. The Minister takes over that position at a critical time. A position of stalemate has arisen as a result, I think, of small-minded decisions having been taken when statesmanship was demanded. It will be the Minister’s task to get the ball rolling again. In doing so I believe there will have to be a complete re-appraisal of his policy, because on the present road there are so many pitfalls that I do not believe they will be able to satisfy the legitimate ambitions and wants of the Coloured people. From this side of the House, realizing full well the magnitude of this hon. Minister’s task and the importance of his being successful, for the country as a whole, I, in conjunction with the members on this side of the House, want to wish the hon. the Minister well in the big task he is undertaking. This has not been a case of changing horses in mid-stream. It has merely been a repositioning of the horses in the team. The Minister is a Cape man. The affairs of the Coloured people are essentially Cape orientated. Of necessity they must be so. The Minister has had experience in the department. He has, I would say—and I am glad to be able to mention this in the House—an entrée to the Coloured people. Under the circumstances, I therefore believe this hon. Minister is well equipped to deal with the problems. Let me merely say to him: The time is critical; he must give a bold lead. He can count on the support of this side of the House. He can count on my support on every step that he is prepared to take in the best interests of the Coloured people, because those will be steps in the best interests of South Africa. I for one do not want to exploit the dilemma of the Government—there is a dilemma at the moment—and I also do not want to exploit the ambitions of the Coloured people for purely political gain. I believe in circumstances like these we must rise above that kind of thing. However, I should like to warn the hon. the Minister that if he listens unnecessarily to messages that he may get from the north and he is not prepared to move fast enough, in me he will have a severe but constructive critic.

I note with satisfaction that the hon. the Minister will now only be handling one portfolio. This I think is significant progress in that it indicates, I think for the first time, that the Government accepts and properly evaluates the importance of the task which this hon. Minister will have to face. If the hon. the Minister handles his portfolio properly, it can lead to a state of affairs in which meaningful participation will be accorded to the Coloured people in taking decisions which affect their future and their well-being. From our side we will be watching the handling of this portfolio very, very carefully indeed.

First of all we will be looking at his handling of the budget from every angle to see that sufficient funds are being set aside above all for education. I believe that as far as the Coloured people are concerned it is education that needs the most urgent attention of the hon. the Minister. There can be no doubt that progress has been made, but I believe that in spite of the progress there is a serious backlog. It will be one of the first tasks of the hon. the Minister to see that that backlog is eliminated. He will have to pay attention to the training of teachers, of which there is a tremendous shortage. He will have to see that adequate funds are provided for more classrooms, more buildings and other educational facilities. He will have to see that there is a phasing out as quickly as possible of the double-shift system. He will have to launch a systematic attack on that aspect. Most important of all, he will have to see that there is a reduction in and a phasing out of the salary gap which exists between the salaries of the White teachers and those of the Coloured teachers in South Africa. This is a very serious matter. I can tell the hon. the Minister what is happening. Because of this situation and because of conditions in the private sector where we are finding an increasing acceptance of equal pay for equal work, qualified teachers are leaving the teaching profession to take up positions in the private sector. This is a matter to which the hon. the Minister must give very serious attention.

I should like to ask the hon. the Minister to pay attention to providing proper training facilities for the Coloured people in the technical field. There is a tremendous backlog in this regard. If we want to beat inflation, then we have to see that everybody has the opportunity to become trained so that everyone can make a contribution to increased productivity. I believe, in so far as the Coloured people are concerned, that they have a tremendous role to play and they have tremendous potential. They will be able to fulfil that role if their resources, their ability and their willingness is properly harnessed. I think this matter has been neglected and it is one of the issues to which the hon. the Minister should pay particular attention.

We will be watching the hon. the Minister to see what he is going to do to eliminate the hardships which are created in terms of the Group Areas Act; not only by the Group Areas Act as such, but also in the manner it is administered. I suggest that one of the things the hon. the Minister can do right away is to go to Somerset West to see what he can do for that community of Coloured people who have been settled in that town for very many years. They want to stay there. They have permanent homes there; they have property. However, in terms of the Government’s policy they are now being encouraged to move. I cannot say they are being forced out, but there is pressure on them to move elsewhere. I believe this is something which the hon. the Minister can tackle immediately. He can do a service to the Coloured community if he will initiate rethinking in regard to District Six and its environs. I believe that is a matter which needs the attention of the Government.

I think the hon. the Minister can have a look at the streamlining of the administration of the whole Department of Coloured Relations and the Department of Coloured Affairs. There is a tremendous amount of overlapping. As the Afrikaner says, “daar is omslagtigheid wat die besluitnemingsproses benadeel. Daar is vertraging.” There must be streamlining in relation to the two departments which deal with Coloured affairs.

On every occasion that I happen to participate in a debate of this nature and one has to speak on behalf of the Coloured people, then I for one am conscious of two things. In the first place there is the tremendous responsibility that rests on the shoulders of anybody who has to speak in this House on behalf of another community. In the second place, the question arises whether one is really qualified to speak on behalf of another community. I believe that I am as well qualified to speak on this particular subject as any other hon. member in this House. Are we, however, qualified to talk about the problems of the Coloured people when we have not been subjected to the laws of this land which deny them many of the privileges which we enjoy? Can we speak with authority on a subject like that? I do not believe that we really can. However, the position is that we have to do it and I hope that when other hon. members speak on behalf of a community that is not represented here, they will bear in mind that they have in fact a big responsibility. There are people who erroneously believe that they are in a position to speak on behalf of the Coloured people. They pose as experts on the Coloureds. Sir, that sort of person is very, very rare indeed. I know of one and that is Dr. I. D. du Plessis. They are, however, a rare breed. When we talk about speaking on behalf of other people, I want to say to the Government that I think they took a wise step when they appointed the Erika Theron Commission and also appointed Coloured persons to serve on it. If one accepts the principle that it is not easy to speak on behalf of other people, then one must admit that they have done the country a service and the commission a service by appointing Coloured persons to present the view of the Coloured people. If they had not done that, then I say that that commission’s report would have been entirely irrelevant. It is because we in the United Party are fully aware of these basic facts and realize that any constitutional arrangement or proposal or plan which does not provide representation of all race groups in the highest forum of the land simply cannot succeed, that we have formulated our federal constitution. Because it takes cognizance of these basic facts, I said earlier that if the Government would accept our proposals, they would be doing a service to South Africa. I want to say that, having looked at the advent of our history, I am now more firmly convinced than ever that our proposals are very important in so far as the present situation is concerned.

The federal plan for which we stand and continue to press, has certain basic tenets. First of all, there will be no constitutional change without thorough consultation. Consultation is a basic part of our proposals. Each ethnic group will have its own legislative assembly and no ethnic group will dictate to any other or dominate any other in regard to its own affairs. Every group shall share both power and responsibility, exercised through a federal assembly, in those matters which are indivisible and of common concern to all the peoples in South Africa. What is more, we have gone further in so far as the Coloured people are concerned. We have said that, where it is the desire of the legislative assembly of, say, the Whites and Coloureds in the Cape, or any others for that matter, to merge their interests within the federal framework on terms and conditions agreed between them, not only would we of the United Party encourage this to happen, but we would go as far as we could to make it possible because we believe that this could well be in the interests of both South Africa and the Coloured people. Whether or not such a merger were to take place within the federal framework in terms of our policy, we in this party believe—I say this with all the earnestness at my command—there can be nothing less than full citizenship for the Coloured people of South Africa.

In this regard the Government is in a dilemma. If they stick to their present unitary constitution, then in spite of any adaptations they may make to that constitution, there can be no real moral basis for their policy because it does not provide for representation of the Coloured people in the highest forum of this land. That is their problem and their dilemma. However, the hon. the Minister has another dilemma. The policy of this Government and the National Party was first stated in the election manifestos way back in 1948 and has been unfolding over the years, yet having got to this advanced point, they find their policy totally rejected by the Coloured people. Why is it rejected? The answer is simply that you cannot have two sovereign governments in one country. I am afraid that at this stage the Coloured people see the CRC as an instrument of compulsory separation and discrimination that denies them the basic rights and privileges of citizenship. This is a matter the hon. the Minister will have to face up to squarely.

This brings me to more recent events which have taken place since this Assembly last met. The fact that the Government saw fit to take the unprecedented step—I would be interested to hear what the hon. the Minister has to say about this—of dismissing the chairman of the CRC from office can only be seen as a tragedy. Whether the hon. the Minister at that time was acting on his own or whether he received advice from others, the step taken has inevitably led to greater confrontation. It solved no problems. We believe that consultation must be the best means of solving crises and problems. We also believe and hope that there is a desire on the part of both the White and Coloured people to find sensible solutions. However, because the proposals by the Government to give the Coloured people representational statutory boards and to create a cabinet council are the most advanced proposals and authoritative consultative machinery the Government has yet created and because this machinery was seen by a very large number of Coloured people as providing an effective consultative basis, I do not believe any drastic steps should have been taken, no step so drastic as the dismissal of the duly elected leader of the Coloured people. Such a step should not have been taken when the negotiations between the Government and the Labour Party had reached such a crucial stage. I personally hoped that the Labour Party would have put this machinery to the test to see what results it in fact may have produced in the negotiations. However, the hon. the Minister now finds himself in great trouble. The dismissal of Mr. Leon, the chairman of the CRC, has consolidated even moderate Coloured opinion against the CRC as a constitutional instrument and it is going to make further consultation more difficult.

However, in spite of the extensive differences that exist between the policy of my party and that of the Government and the difficult circumstances in which the hon. the Minister finds himself, I want to say to him that, in taking over this portfolio, as I said earlier, he will have our support for all the positive steps he takes and we wish him well in his efforts. I want to say, though, that the Government must think very carefully about the steps it takes in the future. I do not believe the Coloured people want to reject the CRC simply for the sake of rejecting it. I do not think they want to be unco-operative simply for the sake of being unco-operative. They reject the CRC because they see it as an instrument of apartheid. We cannot bluff ourselves, for this is one of the facts with which we are faced. This is a constitutional instrument which deprives them of the kind of citizenship they are entitled to enjoy in the land of their birth. This is the problem. The Government has helped them to this point of view by its own actions, which I believe were ill-considered. In the very first CRC election the balance of power was virtually placed in the hands of the party that in fact did not win that election. The Government had an executive in the CRC that went out of its way to co-operate with the Government. That executive did everything in its power to consult with and assist the Government in creating a better deal for the Coloured people. However, how much progress did the Government make during that period? How many of the reasonable requests which the executive of the CRC put to this Government were met? All this tended to create a lack of faith among the Coloured people. Then, after the second election, the then Minister of Coloured Affairs took certain powers on himself. In a long debate in this Assembly, he indicated that in certain circumstances he would take over all the powers of the CRC with the exception of certain legislative powers.

That was debated last year.

I know it was. I am just reminding the hon. member in case his memory was fading. The point is that the fact that those powers were taken was a further diminution in the status of the CRC in the eyes of the Coloured people. I am saying that, for these reasons, the Government tended to break down the institution they were proposing to establish. What happened after that? Having taken over the power to deal with the budget, the Minister, instead of quietly getting on with this job, decided to replace the elected leader of the Coloured people who was also chairman of the CRC with a Government nominee. I have the highest regard for this person who was put in the saddle, but she had played a very small role in the politics of the Coloured people. This hon. lady in turn delegates many of her powers to, whom I would say, are worthy officials of her department. But now the Government, after all its efforts to provide the Coloured people with an instrument worthy of those people, has stripped it of all the powers it ever had. No wonder the new Minister finds himself, I believe, in a bit of a dilemma. [Time expired.]

Mr. Speaker, I want to confine myself solely to the third leg of the motion proposed by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition in this no-confidence debate. Although it may seem inappropriate that I should reply on behalf of a department of which I am no longer in charge, actions have often been referred to me in recent months. It is only right, therefore, that I should come to this House and state the facts clearly for the sake of the record. Last year it was contended in the House—and representations were even made accordingly—that what the Coloured Council fails to do should be reported here every year.

I remember the statement made here by the Opposition, namely that the dismissal of the Leader of the Opposition in the CRC—the leader of his people—was something which should not have occurred. Now the hon. member for Port Elizabeth Central makes a similar statement. By the way, the Leader of the Opposition in the CRC, who is the Leader of the Labour Party …

There was no opposition.

I am going to tell you why I use the word “opposition” so readily. You ought then to understand it fully. I shall read this to you in a moment.

The leader of the Labour Party, who was dismissed, was a leader of his people in the political sense and on the governmental level. However, he was appointed by this Government in a specific post which involved specific duties and which placed him in an official capacity in relation to the Government. Let us not forget that. This involves very substantial additional privileges, but it also involves specific duties which he is statutorily obliged to carry out.

It is the sovereignty of the Coloured …

I am making my speech and I shall not reply to any interjection, unless it is in the form of a fair question put to me. I want to quote the third leg of the motion introduced by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition in the No-confidence Debate. It is a plea for the improvement of race relations by making more rapid progress towards a system that will unite South Africans of all races in a common loyalty. The policy of the United Party—and I take it that the second opposition, which did not introduce a specific motion in this particular sense, agrees with it and also offers its own system as one which will give rise to a common loyalty towards South Africa—amounts, by implication, to race harmony.

However, it is fitting that I should now tell you the story of Mr. Leon. It has been rendered in so many different ways in newspapers, often by correspondents who did not take the trouble to read the Act. Mr. Leon was appointed as chairman of the executive of the CRC after the Labour Party had won the election last year. In my opinion it was logical to offer this post to him, although there was difference of opinion in his party as to whether he should accept it or not. Even at that stage he experienced strong opposition in his party and pressure was exerted on him not to accept the appointment. Pressure was also exerted on him not to nominate members of the Labour Party for appointments in the Council, so much opposition that he was told he should send a telegram withdrawing his nominations. But he did not withdraw them. I nominated four members and they accepted the nominations. I do not want to go into this further, but I do just want to say this: The Government did its part to prove its bona fides towards a party which was legally elected by inhabitants of this country, by a national group which does not have direct representation here. Nowhere in the Act relating to the CRC does it state that the Government is obliged to appoint the Chairman of the Executive from the ranks of the victorious party. On the contrary, the Government can decide to appoint a chairman who is totally neutral, particularly when it is borne in mind that he is in an official capacity in relation to the Government and will sometimes have to do things which will not necessarily be consistent with party policy. Mr. Leon accepted the post as well as the obligations it involved. These obligations were mentioned to him by implication in his letter of appointment. I just want to correct a misconception concerning his position by mentioning that although he was elected as leader of his people, he was appointed in an official capacity and had a specific duty towards the Government and was remunerated by the Government.

And received additional remuneration.

Yes, R9 000 per annum extra. The purpose of this was to offer the Labour Party the opportunity to govern. If we in South Africa ever want to co-operate, we must make efforts to find each other, despite differences. The Government has attempted to do its part in this way, as I have just explained. But in the meantime we in this House passed an Act which entrusted certain powers to the Minister. He may appoint anyone to approve the Budget, or to do anything else which had not been done. But the Budget was not mentioned. The reason for the legislation was to counter the declared intention of the Labour Party to destroy the CRC as an institution with a mandate from the voters. For this the Labour Party received 60% of the votes cast. This represented 30% of the total number of Coloured voters. Now you must again consider the nature of our moral obligation towards the Coloureds. Because the Labour Party was out to destroy the CRC I had to consider measures in a wide context to allow the administration to continue with its activities at a time when Parliament was not in session. That is why these wide executive powers were given me by this House to exercise at my discretion in order to prevent chaos in the Coloured Council, something which could occur in many ways. It is not impossible, for example, that a quorum could be lacking. We did not know what the outcome of the election would be. We could have been faced with an executive which did not want to do its work at all. In the light of what you will hear later, you will understand why this is quite possible. Solemn declarations are expected from you and me in the institutions of the Republic to do certain things. Similar solemn undertakings were given by all these people. This discretionary power I then carried out. Mr. Leon was the logical person to appoint to carry out a certain function. The Act and not the regulations entrusts to him the managing of finances. He knew that that was his function. The Act provides that the CRC has to vote a certain sum of money which has already been approved by Parliament. Consequently the money is already there. The chairman of the executive management only has to make it available. That is all. That is really what it amounts to. This is what was elevated to the status of a tremendous principle and a confrontation with the Government. He was the logical person to choose to do this work.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask the hon. the Minister a question? Was another budget of R250 million submitted to Leon at one stage?

No information concerning any form of the Budget is made known to this House before it comes before the House. It is the custom, and it is still the position at present, that anyone who does anything of this nature is in fact exceeding his rights. For me to reply to that would therefore, in my opinion, in itself constitute an infringement. Now one can think for oneself to what extent one can have confidence in people who have to bear the responsibility in regard to budget secrecy. Mr. Leon was then nominated as the logical choice; I had no reason to nominate anyone else. Why should I nominate anyone else if this man was available in a personal capacity to do the work? In his personal capacity, he accepted that there were certain charges and delegations from the Minister which he would have to carry out in accordance with law. This was one of his implicit functions even though a list of directives was not given him. In the course of six or seven months Mr. Leon carried out his work in the normal way under a system which he himself detested. Without consulting his party on each occasion, he carried out his work. Some people tell me that I could have appointed someone else. Whom should I have appointed? Should I have appointed another Coloured, a so-called “stooge”, to do Mr. Leon’s work for him while he was paid and occupied that high position?

I myself could have stepped in and rectified the matter, Oh yes, I myself could have taken over the functions of the Council without my issuing the directive to the people in the Executive who had already accepted their duties and had been carrying them out for six months and were being paid for it. They told me nothing in advance and the Council did not even discuss the Budget. Mr. Leon discharged his obligations by submitting the Budget, but it was seen to that the Council never even discussed it. The Council did not even have an opportunity to express itself as regards the Budget—despite the suspicion that it would in any event have rejected the Budget. These are the facts. Why, then, in a case like this, should one give someone the opportunity simply to go his own way? What would the Government’s image have been in everyone’s eyes, including yours, if I had gone ahead and done something which I had never done before and which was not my job, but someone else’s?

In the second place, there was no chaos. For seven months the people worked within the system and there was no reason to believe that it would not have been able to carry out this simple task. I could for example have nominated a White person, but what would have been said then? It would have been said that the Whites controlled the CRC entirely and there would have been talk of White baasskap. I could have done all these things, but I did not. I did the logical thing, that which can logically be expected if one takes into account the short history which preceded it. Mr. Leon knew full well what all this involved. There is no question of his being unaware of all these things. The appointment was made with a specific directive which was not carried out. The result was in fact that it was said that there was coercion by the party and that it was decided that he should not carry out the duty. If for example, there is a large number of delegations—and there are many of them—which are not carried out, must I then, after we have allowed such a confrontation to take its rotten course—the course of a government which does not want to govern—on every occasion say that the Labour Party must be asked what it has to say in every instance? The Labour Party did not appoint Mr. Leon; this Government appointed him. What I am saying now does not arise out of antagonism towards him as a person. It is a statement of what really happened; it is an exposition of the facts. It concerns an appointment, a directive and a party decision concerning it. Nor does it only concern the person who in law has the right to issue that directive and to ensure that the duties which arise out of the appointment are in fact performed.

Confrontation was predicted by the press and by Mr. Leon himself by way of the press. They said that they sought and wanted confrontation. After about ten to twelve days he informed me that he was not in a position to accept the Budget since his people and his executive did not wish it. To the present day he has not told me that he will not do it, but that he is not in a position to accept the delegation. I explained to him clearly that he had no choice; this was ordinary administrative work and he could continue even though he did not agree with it; it was his duty to do so. After all, the Government had only one choice, because what would the Government do if an administrator, who is not elected either, but who is the leader of his Province, were to refuse to introduce a budget, for example in Natal where the United Party is in the majority in the provincial council? I have wondered what the Government would do in such a case, because theoretically it is only possible that it could happen because he is an appointed person. In any event it is a directive and the Government has no choice in the light of what it has been plainly told, viz. that they are out for confrontation and that they will not do this. Feelings were gradually beginning to ran high, not only against the Government, but against the White people too, and the Government had no choice but to do its duty. It can never subject itself to the aspirations of a political party which as such is a subordinate body because this body, after all, is not yet at a level at which it is sovereign or just like this Parliament. That we know, after all. It is the present position and one which we want to change and rectify, but apparently people do not want to come and talk about it nor do they want to understand it. Discipline and administration hold good without respect of persons. This applies in this Parliament, in the Cabinet, and irrespective of whether I am the leader of a thousand, ten thousand, twenty or a hundred thousand people. If a government governs and has the respect of its people, it must be willing to face risks, even though its actions should arouse the suspicion of those who are ignorant concerning the true facts, and in this case it was not so difficult to arouse suspicion. The Government must have the courage of its convictions and that courage this Government had in this instance and it acted. Measures were adopted and I want to tell you that this was government action taken on my advice and precisely the same action would be taken if the same circumstances were to re-occur and as long as the present dispensation continues.

It must be clearly understood that this has nothing to do with my feelings towards the aspirations, towards the grievances and towards those things which Mr. Leon and his people envisage for their people, and not only they, but also many other Coloureds far more numerous than they. I refer to the Federal Party, the various other small parties and to the silent majority of 50% with whom I have the fullest sympathy. After all, surely I have proved through the years that it could have had nothing to do with that. This was a technical administrative matter. However, the decision was taken to elevate it to the status of a martyrdom, something which we foresaw and which in any event we had to take account of. I have the greatest sympathy concerning many of the things which are being fought for and I am exerting myself and will in the future continue to exert myself to help to bring these aspirations to fruition, because I am dealing not only with a person, but also with other people who need assistance. Many of the members of my party will exert themselves, too, in striving for the removal of those things which caused grievances and for the establishment of improved conditions for these people. Even though these things were to continue to receive attention, the progress we have made over the years and are still making and which is phenomenal will not win us thanks from certain people, owing to an antagonistic attitude. And to want to use political coercion in a disorderly way against a government and to incite people against the government, as it were, in order to force it to deviate it from the orderly administrative and legal disciplines, is to seek disorderly change, revolutionary change. This cannot be allowed. If there was a shred of morality in this leader, then as far as I am concerned only one option was open to him and that was to resign. This he did not want to do. He wanted to cling to the privileges he had. He wanted to have his bread buttered on both sides. If he had resigned he would have compelled my respect for him as a person. I can well understand that a person can find himself in a dilemma of this kind. He would have compelled my respect for him as a person if he had come to the conclusion that he could not reconcile his duties with his party’s policies. Who could have held that against him? On the contrary, informed people must then have had respect for him. However what was done was that people who did not know any better, people who congregate in crowds and who do not—and I say this with the greatest respect and piety—have many forms of diversion, were assembled in order to tell them about these things. The main theme was Black people against White people. Mr. Leon chose to be a martyr. Meetings were held. Nevertheless, the position is not as bad as some people want it to be. There was no depth in these agitations. When I say this, I realize that they could perhaps begin to hold meetings again. However, I myself received almost a hundred telegrams congratulating me and telling me that I had done the right thing. Apart from the telegrams during this period I also received innumerable letters from people who have the interests of the Coloureds at heart. What is interesting is that I received many letters from people very high up in the hierarchy of the Labour Party. I now want to quote briefly from a letter which I received from a certain person. I do not want to identify this person because it is possible that he could be victimized later. He states (translation)—

He goes on to say (translation)—

Who wrote the letter?

I shall not mention the name but I can assure hon. members that it is a person high up in the hierarchy of the Labour Party. Nor is he the only one, he is one of a very large number. At this stage they are not prepared to accept what the militant wing of the party wants, to prescribe to them.

I want to say a few words about political systems. It is being suggested to us that political systems must now be called into being and developed hastily and rapidly in order to bring about order, mutual confidence and race harmony. I just want to say that nowhere in the world where there is a minority or a majority of White and Black people, are systems to be found in which an integrated political authority has led to mutual confidence in the sense of race harmony. We do not have this in America or in England. The idea of a unitary community is continually held before us as the Utopia of racial peace. Is this what has happened in Angola? Is this what has happened at places where full integration is accepted in any event? Has it happened in Mozambique? It does not happen anywhere. We in South Africa must recognize that we have a multiplicity of peoples. That is the true position. The National Party believes that its policy of the acceptance of human dignity, of the gradual transfer to these people of the responsibilities they have to bear, of their inclusion—I am now referring to Coloureds—in councils in which they have to take those responsibilities in regard to their own people on their shoulders, of the recognition of group interests, of the recognition of groups that exist, the recognition of the striving of groups with their own background and history and with a vision of the future, will promote racial peace and common loyalty and harmony. Without giving any group the right to think that any other group is inferior, the National Party will prepare a path under unique circumstances which can involve far more benefits than those which have already been tested elsewhere and have proved a failure. In 1971 the hon. the Prime Minister said that this was the start of a great campaign for racial harmony. On the occasion of the Republican festival he said that there were no inferior people in South Africa. This met with a response everywhere in the country. This system of group differentiation, of group interest and group aspirations is contained in our policy and is mentioned repeatedly. What does the United Party offer? They offer a federal policy which is initially also based on the recognition of separate groups. It is based initially on “apartheid”. However, the veneer remains until such time as Parliament is converted into a unitary federal system in which there is integration of authority. In other words, it is a gradual integration. The hon. member for Pinelands states: “There is no White South Africa.” The hon. member reminds me of the man who, seeing an elephant for the first time, said that there was no such animal. The hon. member should look into a mirror one day and close his eyes and say: “There is no White South African.”

Tell us where it is.

Unfortunately, there will always be groups in our country which will seek points of friction. Fortunately there will also be other groups which will always be willing to eliminate points of friction and to eliminate entirely old established beliefs or customs of inferiority. This task is being carried out systematically by the Government. We want to make the ordering of the relationship between our peoples the most important aspect. We want to effect an orderly development. In conclusion I just want to say this: It was said at the Labour Party’s meeting that the United Party and the Progrefs regularly approached them for guidance. The following was said—

This was said by Mr. Peters at their congress. He went on to say—

Taking into account the question of mutual trust—and we must trust each other and talk to each other, as the hon. member for Port Elizabeth Central put it—I just want to read the following piece too—

Now, I need go no further. I just want to refer to one anomaly. You are a party standing for capitalism in South Africa, all of you. Do you believe what is stated here—

What kind of language is this? The leaders with whom you speak reject your systems in its entirety. The system envisaged here is a revolutionary, socialist system, so you will have to take care when you want to prescribe to us how we are to change our system, the system which is still the only one which has ensured that racial peace prevails in this country.

Mr. Speaker, the ex-Minister of Coloured Affairs would have made his successor’s task considerably easier if he had not made this speech in the House today. Throughout the many excuses and explanations—and these are all the hon. the Minister’s speech consisted of—it was very clear that the Minister was not capable of convincing this House of the Coloured Persons Council being able to fit in with the policy of the Nationalist Party in any way whatsoever; because the policy of the Nationalist Party for the Coloureds, as well as for the Indians and for the Black people in South Africa is that they, as peoples, should have a sovereign right in South Africa, a right of self-determination, to conduct all their affairs on an equal basis with those of the Whites. When the hon. the Minister said that when the leader of the Coloured people, the democratically elected leader of the Coloured people, was acting as chairman of that council, he was doing so in consequence of an appointment by the Government and that the Government consequently had the right to appoint or dismiss him in its discretion, the Minister confirmed in this House that the Council, as the Coloureds see it, was a “monstrosity”. Surely the fact of the matter is that until such time as all South Africans, irrespective of their race or colour, are included in one political system, it is impossible to grant separate sovereignty within one country to a separate race or a separate group. [Interjections.]

Sir, I should like to make just a few remarks in connection with the theme of the speech of the hon. member for Johannesburg West. I must say that I was extremely disappointed in what he said and I shall tell you why. We on this side of the House, and South Africa and the whole world, wrote off nine-tenths of the Nationalist Party a long time ago. For them there is no hope; but in their ranks there are 10 or 12 or 15 members, among whom we ranked the hon. member for Johannesburg West, for whom we have always seen some hope. There was some light; the man sounded a little enlightened and there was hope. But now the hon. the Prime Minister has completely bedevilled this with his appointment of the hon. member for Waterberg to his Cabinet, because you know, Sir, since the appointment of the hon. member for Waterberg to the Cabinet by the Prime Minister, members such as the hon. member for Johannesburg West, the hon. member for Vereeniging and quite a few others who very badly wish to become members of the Cabinet, have seen the way to the Cabinet as being an extremely verkrampte one. For that reason the hon. member for Johannesburg West has abandoned his enlightened ideas altogether and now comes forward with ideas which differ completely from those he used to advocate. I want to put this mildly in saying that in my opinion it is extremely arrogant, extremely conceited, for a White man who sits in this House and who is a member of the White group in South Africa, who can avail himself of and exercise to the full every personal right existing in South Africa, who can decide where he wishes to live and how he wishes to live and what he wishes to do and where he wishes to do it, to act this way. [Interjections.] Yes, Sir, in South Africa the hon. member for Johannesburg West can exercise to the full every personal right which exists. He has the right to make use of the best educational facilities in South Africa. [Interjections.]

May I ask the hon. member a question?

No, I do not have time. The hon. member for Johannesburg West can decide where he wishes to work and in what capacity he wishes to work. The hon. member can decide where to live, and were it not for this Government, he could have decided to live in Soweto as well. He has the full right to own his own house. He has the right of ownership. But he denies the other South Africans that right. Sir, our party attaches great value to the right of the individual and to the right of the group. Every individual or group has the right to practise their religion and to maintain their identity and has the right to exercise their cultural rights. It is part of our constitution that those rights may be exercised, and that they will be protected by the Government of the day. But that hon. member now has the audacity to say that only the Whites may exercise that right in South Africa, and that the Whites will decide on the rights of every other South African, and that every other South African will be subject to the decisions of the Whites. [Interjections.] We cannot agree with that. I just want to mention that basically this was part of the ideology of the Fascist State, and the hon. member came very close to that when he aired those ideas here.

The hon. member also dealt with Angola. I should like to put a few matters beyond any doubt. The Nationalist Party Government does not have the right to involve South Africa militarily in the territory of any other state without having consulted this Parliament. Nor does it have the right to involve South Africa in a civil war in a neighbouring state without consulting Parliament and the South African people. If the Government wants the support of South Africa as a whole in adventures of that nature in future, then it should consult Parliament and the population of South Africa with regard to such action. I want to read out what Prof. Van der Vyver said in connection with the actions of this Government:

He is professor in law at the University of Potchefstroom. The Government may decide, if it thinks fit, not to inform the people, but when the hon. the Minister of Defence wants to inform the people from this House, he should inform the people fully and should not imply that we are active on the border on a limited basis. In that case he should inform the nation fully about the extent to which we have become involved in Angola in the struggle against the MPLA. The people of South Africa, the parents and the citizens of South Africa, who were uncertain, who were confused, have the right to know under what circumstances their children are expected to defend South Africa there. If the case of the Government is a good one, irrespective of whether we agree with them or not, and if it is in the interests of South Africa, the Government will find that all South Africans of all race groups and of all political convictions will support him 100% in a struggle of that kind. But up to this day we do not know—because the hon. the Minister has not yet given the answers—what the real facts and the truth are in respect of the Government’s action there. The Government has abandoned a basic principle, the principle that we shall not interfere in the affairs of a neighbouring state. When that principle is abandoned it is to be expected that the Government will run into problems in the future. This is a principle we have adhered to over the decades and which we applied at the U.N. when we were attacked by other groups of nations. The Government must expect that it will run into problems now, because the world will say we cannot support a principle one moment and abandon it the next and then expect the world to give heed to that principle again. We went to confront a potential enemy in Angola and because of that confrontation we may expect to meet with a real enemy today. In other words, this Government precipitated this problem for South Africa. The Government also brought down on us the wrath of Africa and of the world. That wrath is a direct result of the domestic policy of this Government, a policy of discrimination, based solely on colour, against Black people in South Africa who are citizens of our country, and not because we are South Africa, not because ours is a rich country, but basically and primarily because we implement policies in South Africa which allow harsh, inhuman discrimination solely on the basis of the colour of a person’s skin, irrespective of the fact that he is a citizen of the country. Communism is an enormous threat to us and to the world. We shall have to fight communism. I want to say, however, that we shall not win the struggle against communism simply by the use of arms. We can win the struggle against communism only if we are capable of competing with communism. In other words, if South Africa wants to keep communism out of South Africa, if South Africa wants to defeat communism, we must create socio-economic conditions in South Africa which offer every South African, irrespective of his race or colour, better circumstances of life—for instance, better education, better housing and better employment opportunities—than communism can offer him. Only then can we be successful against the onslaughts of communism. It is the task of the Government to create those socio-economic conditions in South Africa, not only through aggression and the use of arms. It is important, however, that South Africa, through the use of arms, create a shield so that we may use the time and avail ourselves of the opportunity behind that shield to effect in South Africa the changes which are essential to bring about the conditions I have outlined—the improved socio-economic conditions—for all, irrespective of their colour. This will afford South Africa the opportunity to combat communism successfully.

Mr. Speaker, I do not think it is necessary for me to reply in detail to the speech made by the hon. member for Bryanston. Apart from a few objectionable statements, I do not think he said much. In any event I think that the bulk of his speech had been replied to in advance by the hon. the Minister of Defence, and the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs. They replied to the question of South Africa’s involvement in Angola at length and effectively. He need not even have listened to the hon. Minister of Defence or the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He could simply have listened to his own semi-frontbencher, the hon. member for Yeoville, whose speech in this House, with a minor reservation here and there, I sincerely wish to recommend to him for study and perhaps, too, for emulation as regards its good spirit and patriotism. Perhaps the soul-searching which was contained in the speech by the hon. member for Yeoville, was a medicine that was a little too strong for the backbencher from Bryanston. The hon. member for Bryanston said here that it was impossible—I do not know precisely what he meant and I hope I understood him correctly—to grant autonomy to the various ethnic groups until such time as there was one central Parliament for the whole of South Africa. I cannot appreciate such a nonsensical observation. I think that history will prove to the hon. member within a few months that a great nation such as the Xhosa nation, more numerous than the White nation, will in fact achieve autonomy and independence within the over-all South African geographical framework without having representation in one central Parliament. We shall have complete respect for the freedom of that nation, and we shall help them to achieve that freedom.

The hon. member also referred here to the hon. member for Johannesburg West. I can understand his being distressed because the hon. member for Johannesburg West offered him no comfort, or any prospect of his being able to play him off against the National Party. What the hon. member for Johannesburg said here this afternoon I endorse 100%. It is nothing but the policy of the National Party. If the hon. member wants a little food for thought now, he would do well to reflect on why a person whom he and his Press wrote off, and of whom they sketched a deplorable picture of verkramptheid and narrow-mindedness, is being asked to render a service to a specific department, such as the Department of Bantu Administration and Education. It is my privelege to perform this task in the near future.

I do not want to go into the speech made by the hon. member for Bryanston any further. Hon. members will probably have appreciation for the fact that I do not intend furnishing a preview on this occasion of actions within the specific department or departments which I shall serve. I believe there is truth in the words from Scripture which say: Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off. I have only just girded on my harness, and I am still finding my feet. I do not think I am telling the House a secret when I say this. However, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity which is being offered to me to assist in serving the interests of the Black peoples in South Africa. I regard it as an opportunity. I think hon. members know what my loyalty to my own people is. I think they know that I insist inexorably on the rights, privileges and freedoms of my people. No one will have to outbid me as far as my loyalty to my own people is concerned. But having said this, it has to be taken into consideration that I am speaking from that loyalty, and it should also be appreciated that people with such loyalty are willing to render service and give their talents and energies, such as there may be, in the interests of other peoples, neighbouring peoples in South Africa. It is my proud boast that my people—my party, my fellow Whites and my fellow Afrikaners—have laid the foundation for the own freedom and separate freedom of other peoples, in whose existence and future we can see the right of self-determination and are also able to make our contribution towards helping them achieve that self-determination.

Mr. Speaker, may I put a question to the hon. the Deputy Minister?

Mr. Speaker, since I have offered the excuse in advance that I am still new in my office, any meaningful question which he may ask could be replied to far more effectively if he laid it upon the Table. I want to continue by saying that I am proud to be able to join departments which are making history in South Africa. It is not only Nationalists who say this; foreigners also say that we in South Africa are making history, and that we are returning to the Western world as it were a trust in values of which they have lately lost perspective. This is what we are doing in South Africa.

In his speech the hon. the Leader of the Opposition made oblique references to the appointment of my hon. colleague and myself. I can understand that he dare not express confidence in us, for if he were to express confidence in the new appointments, it would actually imply that he should fall in behind us, and then his party has no real right to exist. I can understand that he has to say that he has doubts. Nevertheless we want to give the assurance that we are undertaking this task in the interests of other people with the greatest dedication, and that we regard it as an opportunity to fulfil a calling across the lines of our national and cultural community as well, for the sake of and to the benefit of other peoples.

The hon. the Leader of the Opposition referred to the two predominant philosophies which are current in the world. He typified the two philosophies as being communism and democracy. We have appreciation for the approach of the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, and in the struggle which South Africa, together with the free world, is waging against enslavement by communism, against its aggressive objectives and against its imperialism right up to our borders, we appreciate the actions and the statement of standpoint by the Opposition. I think South Africa perceives this. We can also understand the actions of the hon. member for Yeoville. Those people know what enslavement by communism means, and they know that it should be resisted with all one’s might, and not only with military forces. They know that the spiritual strength of our people should be awakened and made defensible to this end.

However, when the hon. the Leader of the Opposition simply sets communism against democracy, I do think it is a little of an over-simplification. I should like to suggest that we reflect on this a little more deeply, for democracy does not manifest itself only in a simple pattern. Democracy displays a variety of institutions, a variety of structures within various states. To begin with, we have those states which have a homogeneous population and in which there is no plural structure of peoples and cultures within the same state context. In such a State it is very easy. Then one has the people, the demos which then exercises its power—a homogeneous society. However, this is not the situation throughout the entire world. This is not the position in countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Canada or Cyprus, nor is it the situation in South Africa. When one refers to democracy one must distinguish between States with a homogeneous population structure, and the other States in which there is a heterogeneous population structure.

Not only in South Africa but throughout the entire world there are scholars who are again perceiving this fact acutely now. In the Western world there is a renascence among scientists in the sense that they are calling attention to the fact that in a state with a multi-national population structure one must take into consideration that it is very difficult to bind such a multi-nationality, such a multiplicity of peoples, into one national loyalty or into loyalty to one another in one overall population structure. I need not rely on my own authority now. Recently there was a programme on the BBC on which three authorities appeared, a certain Prof. Burnham, a Prof. Glazer and another authority, in which attention was once again called to the fact that in a plural population structure it is very difficult to bind the people into one national loyalty and that one has to make provision for this in one’s political system.

I also want to refer to a very thorough scientific work by Prof. I. J. van der Walt of Potchefstroom in which the background to growing nationalism is discussed, that which is written off by hon. members opposite. I really think that many of the hon. members should read a little more extensively and take cognizance of such things as these. Prof. Van der Walt says that the peoples of Africa and Asia—contrary to the expectations of Western thinkers who imagined that the primitive and even the culturally more advanced peoples would adopt the Western way of life and mentality and gratefully take their place in the so-called “great society”—had fallen back upon their national character and national identity. In a time in which even the “great society” idea of America is an obsolete concept—the “melting pot” idea of America is obsolete—we now find scholars who are drawing attention to the diversity of cultures. Even from Canada there are people who have referred in South Africa to the mosaic of the Canadian population. The word “mosaic” is a recognition of diversity. Prof. Van der Walt went on to say (translation)—

He also said—

This is the description of nationalism. Hon. members can tell me that this is a language which we hear in South Africa. Yes, it is a language which wells up from the heart of what we are living in South Africa.

I have said that we should examine a little more closely what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition typified in a simple scheme of communism and democracy.

I should like to come to a few observations made by the hon. member for Pinelands. He had quite a lot to say. He spoke of a unified society, of hallmarks everywhere in South Africa which are supposedly reminiscent of the division in South Africa. May I remind him of the very effective quotation made by the hon. member for Green Point from a letter which he, I think almost ex officio, wrote on behalf of the people of Pinelands to ask that certain people working in Ndabeni and Maitland should kindly not walk through Pinelands but find another through route to Langa and Nyanga? [Interjections.] One should not wax eloquent about a unified society and the equal rights which people in all parts of South Africa should have if one does not want this to be applied in the constituency which you represent. That kind of liberalism is familiar to us. It amounts to intolerance when it comes to the practising of what these people preach. One finds people who proclaim integration but who then, with regard to their own homes and neighbourhoods will say: “Over my dead body.” This is the practice we are again finding here.

The hon. member for Pinelands ventured to quote a passage from a letter written by a Black man in South Africa who held up the Afrikaners’ struggle for freedom as an example, and who alleged that the Afrikaner who had aspired to freedom was now, as it were, being called upon to respect the Black man’s aspiration to freedom. Listen to what he said—

Sir, the day when a Black man sees the Afrikaners’ struggle for freedom as an example, and even has recourse to the Great Trek, we have really made great progress. I do not know whether this Black man fully realizes what he was saying, but if the hon. member for Pinelands holds up the struggle for freedom of the Afrikaner as an example, he must not stop half-way as far as its application is concerned. The Afrikaner waged his struggle for freedom and in a very important respect won it, but in the acquisition of his freedom he did not lapse into imperialism. In the acquisition of his freedom, he did not lose sight of the right of other peoples to their own freedom. Hence his policy of multi-nationalism and of separate freedoms. What hon. members on the opposite side apparently want, is that the Afrikaner, who fought to gain his freedom, should now decide with the freedom which he has, to abandon his freedom and to share it with other peoples. After one has acquired one’s freedom, one should voluntarily decide to share it; in other words, after one has fought to preserve one’s life, one should commit suicide. Surely that will not work.

The hon. member referred to the English-speaking sector, to whom an appeal should be made. Let me say that the appeal to English-speaking people to adopt a standpoint against the Afrikaners and to agitate for the freedom of the Black people, is coming very late in the day. It is past; the English-speaking people realize that the policy of the National Party in its essence is a policy of freedom for the various peoples. This policy guarantees the freedom of that… I almost said of that hon. brother … [Interjections]… to utter all kinds of statements in South Africa. It guarantees his freedom to be able to write to the municipality of Pinelands and to ask whether they cannot find another exit for the Black people walking through Pinelands.

In addition, the hon. member waxed eloquent on the importance of unity in South Africa. He said that we should place great emphasis on this and should prevent the fragmentation of the territory. Perhaps the hon. member has heard of the OAU which represents more than 40 countries. That unitary organization was established, but it was not presumed that all of them would comprise one great African state. The unitary organization was established in view of certain common objectives which that entire group of African states shared. We all know how unanimous the members of that organization are at present. I do not think that the hon. member’s idea of unity will go very far. I think he should consider what is happening in practice elsewhere in the world. He should consider what is happening in America. I referred to the idea of the “melting pot”, the idea of the “great society”, the consensus model in a plural society. It simply does not work. I want to ask the hon. member whether his idea of unity has succeeded or will succeed in a country such as Cyprus. I think that one would have to take to one’s heels there. Does the hon. member think that it will succeed in the Middle East or in a country such as Belgium? Belgium, for example, has a population which is racially homogeneous. There is no racial difference between those peoples, but in that country there is no cultural or political unity. There is in fact an over-all political framework, but then with separation to establish and maintain peace and order, and to demarcate and to protect the rights of people vis-à-vis one another.

The hon. member for Pinelands also referred to the question of education and training. In the last part of his speech he said—

But then, as usual, he gets in a dig at the Government—

He went on to speak of—

So he continued. This is beautiful, pious language, but is the hon. member trying to imply that this is not being done? I take it the hon. member has a matriculation certificate. If he places that matriculation certificate alongside the matriculation certificate of any Black pupil, he will see that they are precisely the same. The qualification is of precisely the same standard. These pupils write their examination under the supervision of the Joint Matriculation Board. They are just as subject to the findings of committees which scrutinize the syllabi of the various subjects, and which ensure that the standard of education is the same. What, then, is the hon. member complaining about? He was simply making another statement which could have repercussions overseas, and which creates the impression that there is discrimination in South Africa. It is true that there can be subjects, for example social studies, in which there are adjustments with regard to the particular people to whom that subject is being offered. Surely it is self-evident that, if one offers a subject such as history, one will present the history of the Whites in a different manner to the history of the Zulu. To the Whites a man like President Kruger would be a hero, but to the Zulu it is obvious that a man like Chaka could be a hero. Therefore there is that differentiation in the presentation, but as far as the standard is concerned, there are guarantees that the standards will be the same.

We have not yet found a nation to which the hon. member for Pinelands is a hero.

We have here the suggestion that we are neglecting these people and that an insufficient number of the children are given an opportunity to receive training. The fact of the matter is that there are approximately 4 million Black children attending school this year, which is approximately 21% of the total Black population. If one contrasts this by way of comparison with the position in African states, and even in Europe, one will find that it compares very well indeed. There are States in which school attendance by children is 0,3%. In Zambia, I think, it is approximately 15%. Let us add to this now that this 21% compares very well with the maximum potential of 28% of the entire population which is of school-going age. If one deducts from that the ineducable, the percentage of Black children attending school is exceptionally high. If one also takes into consideration that the number of children attending school in the rural areas, as a percentage, is considerably lower, it means that the percentage of school-going Black children elsewhere has to be far higher to result in an average of 21% of the total population. Of course, there are problems. Hon. members ask why there cannot be compulsory education for Black children. I do not think I am divulging any secrets, nor am I speaking out of turn, when I say that it is basic to the entire policy of the National Party, a policy of development, that the development as far as this matter is concerned is aimed at achieving that ideal for Black children as well. The day will come when every Black child will also be compelled to go to school.

Of course we must take into consideration that we are dealing with people whose right of self-determination we recognize, whose right of self-determination we in fact wish to bring home to them and suggest that they should exercise it. But to put it into operation immediately is impracticable. To mention only one fact to you: While the number of children per teacher among Whites is approximately 22, and among Indians 26, in Bantu schools it is 53. We are therefore saddled with a problem. If we were to make school attendance compulsory immediately, there would be an even greater number of children per available teacher.

To conclude my speech, I should like to say that it is an honour for me to be able to serve this cause and these people, and being a person who loves his own people, who would like to see the interests of his people being served, and a person who simultaneously knows that the application of the law of neighbourly love amounts to one having to love thy neighbour as thyself. What I advocate for my people, and what I demand for them, and what I shall also fight for if it should become necessary, I do not merely fail to begrudge others, but I am also privileged now to be able to serve in a specific capacity and to make this my task. This I do gladly.

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the first speech by the new Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration and Education, but you will be able to understand that at this stage I do not have the time to reply in detail to everything that he said. We took note of his promotion to this important post. In this post he will have to deal with what are probably the two most sensitive aspects of our present-day national life, namely the urban Bantu and Bantu education. We trust that in his new capacity he will be both able and willing to make a real contribution to the solution of the problems we have to face in this respect. I want to say in all honesty that there is no doubt that his promotion was received with a great deal of disillusionment and disappointment, especially by those people whose interests he has to serve in this post. The degree to which the hon. the Deputy Minister himself is responsible for this, is a question I should prefer not to discuss. When I say this it is because these people have an image of him as a man who is obsessed by an ideology, in other words a man whose thoughts are determined in the first instance not by the concrete requirements which exist in South Africa, but by certain preconceived ideological notions. Rightly or wrongly, he has the image of a man who is extremely conservative in his approach—some people would say he is verkramp. This image was created long before the hon. the Deputy Minister became active in politics. In the third place I want to say that his image reflects a lack of attunement to the actual requirements of these people. I should like to express my confidence that in his handling of this post the hon. the Deputy Minister will show that the impression which the Blacks of South Africa and very many other people have of him at this moment, is indeed a false one.

Several speakers have pointed to the importance of this debate and to the crisis situation which has developed in the areas around South Africa as a result of the events in Angola and the Russian-Cuban interference there. The recent events in Zambia intensify the nature of that crisis for ourselves and other countries in Southern Africa. Personally I have not the slightest doubt about the Russian aim of world domination. If they should realize their aims in Angola, South Africa will probably be faced by a new and more dangerous situation. The ever present danger of infiltration of the communist ideology among the people of this part of the continent, will be immeasurably aggravated by the physical presence of a Russian military force. For this reason alone it is imperative that our whole population, Whites and non-Whites, must be made spiritually prepared against the onslaughts of communism. We have often heard in this House that the fight is in the first instance for the heart and mind of man. Therefore it is imperative to realize that the only defence against communism is for individuals and groups to be inwardly convinced not only that communism brings physical and spiritual enslavement, but also that what communism offers compares unfavourably with the rights, privileges, liberties, system of values and the spiritual and material privileges of the society of which that individual or group forms a part and of the political, social and economical system under which they live. Only when people know that they will be worse off under a communist dictatorship, will they be able to resist effectively the propaganda and infiltration of communism.

This is the essence of the motion of no confidence which was introduced by the hon. the Leader of the Opposition, that the Government, through its conduct and policy, has indeed left the greater part of our population, namely the non-Whites, without that spiritual defensibility. It is quite possible, and also understandable, that serious doubts exist among many South Africans about the desirability of the steps which South Africa has taken in the Angolese situation. Here I am not referring to the measures adopted for the protection of the waterworks at Ruacana and Calueque and for the pursuit of terrorists. There is a general consensus that these measures were necessary and desirable. However, there is not the slightest doubt that if South Africa were ever to become involved in a full-scale war effort, and had to defend its own territory, it would be necessary to be sure of the support of the whole population, White and non-White, on the home front. South Africa’s military capacity to conduct such a war, will depend, among other things, on whether it is able to maintain its economic system. This can only be done if the willingness of every South African, White and non-White, to apply his full labour capacity to the promotion of the war effort can be relied on. What is even more important, is that South Africa cannot run the risk of undertaking such an effort without the active support and co-operation of all our people, White and non-White, on the home front. For this reason alone it is essential, as it was put in the motion of no confidence, that a common fidelity and loyalty must be maintained among all citizens of South Africa. The biggest threat to our security comes from communism and communist infiltration in Southern Africa. If this is the case, and most of us here will probably concede it, then surely in Heaven’s name we must get our priorities straight and not waste our time, energy and capital on things and ideologies of lesser importance.

While I was listening to some of the speeches in the House, I got the feeling in this connection that the world in which some of us are still living, is unreal. Listening to the new Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration and Education and the member for Johannesburg West, I was unable to escape the fact that we are really living in a world which has little connection with the realities with which we are faced.

What did they say to which you took exception?

For the simple reason that from what they said it really does not seem as if the true facts concerning the Coloureds, namely that they are unable to develop into an autonomous people with the right of self-determination, sovereign and independent of the Whites, have penetrated through to them. There is really not the slightest realization, as regards the urban people, the Black people of the cities, that the solution for their problems cannot be sought along the path of constitutional development of the Bantu homelands.

What did they say in this respect?

The whole concept of the ideology within the framework as it was put by the two hon. members left no room for doubt about it. This is exactly how they approach the matter. Even if one were to concede that the constitutional and socioeconomic development of the Bantu homelands, within the principles of the framework which he has laid down, would be sound and advantageous, we would still have the position of the Asian, the Coloured and the urban Black man. Unless we can eliminate the points of friction, the bottlenecks in regard to these three groups, and as soon as possible, we will create questions of the greatest magnitude for ourselves. Later in my speech, if there is time, I want to devote attention to aspects of our Coloured policy in particular.

Mr. Speaker, the effect of economic conditions and of economical measures which we adopt is of equally great importance for our group relations in South Africa. I now come to the second part of the no-confidence motion introduced by the hon. Leader of the Opposition. Surely it is obvious that when we as Whites complain about how we are affected by the curse of inflation, the vast majority of non-Whites are affected far more by that inflation. Because of their low levels of income, any rise in the cost of living and any increase in the cost of the main consumer goods involve intense suffering and privation for these people, and also great bitterness. They blame us Whites for this. Just consider for a single moment what our position would have been if we had an income of R15 to R16 a week and out of that amount R2 or more had to be paid just for bus transport between our homes and places of work. And this escalation is continuing. I want to express my conviction on this occasion that as far as this matter is concerned, I believe that we are sitting on a powder keg and that the situation is explosive as far as our urban non-Whites are concerned, with regard to the effect of inflation on their living conditions. What aggravates the situation even further, is that I get the impression that the Government has done little to make the non-Whites aware of the facts in this matter and to inform them how best to utilize their limited means, and to involve them fully in the anti-inflation effort. In another respect, too, the Government’s poor handling of the economy creates major problems for us. If we are in earnest that discrimination must be removed, as my hon. colleague here has indicated, then it is necessary for us to do away with the difference in salaries as soon as possible especially in the professional classes. Furthermore, it is obvious that the diminution and the eventual elimination of discrimination in regard to amounts spent on social services such as education, training, social welfare, pensions, etc., in connection with the different racial groups will place heavy demands on the economical capabilities of our country and especially the Treasury. The fact that by means of the policy which we have pursued till now we have made it impossible for the non-Whites in the country to make their full contribution to our economic growth is bad enough. If we are further forced to say that we cannot eliminate discrimination in these different spheres, because the money is not available for it, we will create a breading ground for agitation and unrest which will pose a real threat to our national security.

Mr. Speaker, I should like to come back to the speech by the hon. the Minister of Health and the problems in connection with the Coloured Representative Council. I want to associate myself with the good wishes which my colleague conveyed to the new Minister in regard to the exceptional task and responsibility which rests on his shoulders. I want to express my thanks to the former Minister of Coloured Relations, now the hon. the Minister of Health, for having sketched for us the story, as seen from his side, of this confrontation with Mr. Leon and the Coloured Council. From the nature of the case this matter can be approached from different points of view. It would be possible, as the hon. the Minister did, to place all the blame on Mr. Leon and his fellow-members of the executive and to accuse him of irresponsibility, lack of co-operation and deliberate attempts to seek confrontation with the Government. Possibly it could also be said that this is the result of the unyielding way in which the Government implements its policy, its inability to understand the feelings and aspirations of the Coloured population, and perhaps also sensitivity on the part of our politicians. We could go on trading reproaches indefinitely. To my mind this would be a totally fruitless waste of time. As I see it, these events are nothing but a further episode on the long road of estrangement which has come into being, mainly as a result of the Government’s policy, between the Government and the Coloureds. It is a symptom of the growing resistance on the part of the Coloureds to the dispensation which has been created for them. It is also a symptom of the increasingly deteriorating relations between the Coloureds and the Whites. It will get us nowhere merely to discuss these symptoms. We shall have to go further in an attempt to determine the basic causes. I hope to come back to this later on. In the meantime we must take note of some of the results of this confrontation which have become obvious. The first, it would appear to me, is that the ordinary Coloured voter—and we must take note of this fact, in spite of what the hon. the Minister said—has become politicized to a greater degree than ever before. As a result of this episode, a new political awareness and political involvement has developed in the ordinary Coloured, the Brown man in the street. As a result a much bigger potential has been created for political mobilization by those politicians who are accepted by the Coloureds as leaders.

In the second place it brought the points of conflict to the force in stronger focus than in the past, stated the dilemma more clearly and placed a large question mark over the continued existence and usefulness of the CRC in its present form, even as an institution. In this regard it has become clear that to an increasing extent the Labour Party is faced with the question—I think the hon. the Minister also referred to this—of how to eliminate the schizophrenia in its basic attitude towards its participation in the CRC. The Labour Party is going to find it progressively more difficult to bring about a reconciliation between participation in the political machine, membership of the CRC and the exercise of its privileges and rights on the one hand, and on the other hand its premise that he will only go along with the machinery of the CRC in order to destroy it.

In the third place, this episode resulted in certain Coloured politicians enjoying far more status than before in the eyes of the Coloured population and it afforded the Labour Party a much greater degree of public support than it previously had. In fact, it seems as if the Federal Party, as far as its elected members in the CRC are concerned, is doomed to being a small and ineffective opposition party which will become more and more irrelevant within the context of Coloured politics.

How do you know that?

I say that it looks like it. The reasons for this are obvious, but time does not permit me to go into it. In the fourth place it has taken the confrontation between these Coloured politicians and the Government a step further and confrontation politics has been given a new and possibly lasting impetus as an instrument or means in the bargaining position of the Coloureds. In this connection it is clear—the hon. the Minister referred to it—that the personalities within Coloured politics who believe in a more aggressive confrontation policy are strongly favoured as against those who adopt a more moderate stand.

In the fifth place it becames clear that with regard to the functions and duties which are delegated to the CRC, and especially the executive, the CRC is in fact nothing but a nought on a contract. Apparently the members of the executive merely served as a rubber stamp. The work was and is done by civil servants of the department, especially White officials. Indeed, the image which most people have of it, is that all the higher posts, all the senior posts in the department of Coloured Relations in the spheres of education, welfare and housing are in the hands of Whites. I have the particulars here, but time does not permit me to furnish them to the House. The fact that Mrs. Jansen, singlehanded, apparently had no trouble doing the work of the entire executive, surely speaks volumes. The sober fact is that a position of checkmate has been reached here, a deadlock, and I do not envy the new Minister his task of creating a new deal for the Coloureds within the framework of the existing Government policy and approach with all its limitations. I have no doubt that whoever the new elected leaders of the Coloured population may be, they will find it progressively more difficult not to use confrontation politics against the Government.

It is obvious that that policy, the present policy has reached a dead end. There is hardly a single thinking person in our country who does not realize that a new approach to White/Coloured relations has become an absolute necessity. If we look at the policy which has been followed during the past few years, may I just say that the pillars of that policy, the upholding of the principle that the Coloureds are a separate nation, and enforced separation, which often goes hand in hand with discrimination, is in fact unacceptable to the Coloureds. In this regard I just want to say that last year I pointed out in this House what, to my mind, are the essential ingredients for a separate nationhood. I pointed out that the Coloured population does not satisfy those requirements. I further want to say that to refer to the Coloureds as a nation in the making is an ideological bandying of meaningless word.

In conclusion, I want to say that as far as the Coloureds are concerned, we cannot continue along this road. If we really believe that our national security is being threatened, then it is necessary that a new deal be established in order to take the Coloureds and the other people who are permanent citizens of our country, with us along this road. In this regard I also want to say that I associate myself fully with the motion which was introduced here by the hon. Leader of the Opposition.

Mr. Speaker, before I reply to certain matters concerning my department, matters which were raised here by hon. members of the Opposition parties, you will allow me to make a few personal remarks. In the first place I should like to express my gratitude towards my erstwhile senior Minister, the hon. the Minister of Social Welfare and Pensions, who afforded me a wonderful training-school in his department and with whom I worked in very close co-operation, as I did with the senior officials in his department. On this occasion I should like to pay tribute to my predecessor, Dr. Schalk van der Merwe, for the teamwork which existed between us. Certain wilful persons outside tried to create the impression—fortunately it was not raised here in this House otherwise I would have reacted to it immediately—that he and I held different views on matters. I just want to say that it was an experience for to have been in a position to work with Dr. Van der Merwe, and it is to my advantage that I shall still be able to work with him as a team in future in his capacity as Minister of Planning, whose department will be closely concerned with the well-being of the Coloured population.

I should like to express my sincere thanks to the hon. member for Port Elizabeth Central, who is the chief spokesman for the United Party on Coloured Affairs, for the way in which he participated in this debate today. I also wish to thank him, as well as the hon. member for Edenvale, for the words of congratulations they addressed to me. If the attitude displayed by the hon. member for Port Elizabeth Central in participating in the debate today, is displayed at all times by all of us with regard to this delicate subject, i.e. our relations with the Coloured population, tensions, if there are any, will disappear. We are responsible politicians in this House, and we should not try to exploit the circumstances of any other particular population group politically. I shall come back to this later, but I should like to assure the hon. member for Port Elizabeth Central now of my appreciation for the attitude he displayed in participating in this debate today. Indeed, I could have expected it. The hon. member is a valued member of the Theron Commission, the report of which will be presented to us later this session, and I believe that in exercising his duties as a member of that commission he became aware of how delicate the matter of the Coloured population was.

I do not think hon. members will expect of me to make a statement on future policies at this early stage. These have, in any event, been spelt out on so many occasions. As recently as 20 October last year the course the policy would take in future was spelt out in the clearest terms by the hon. the Prime Minister himself to the group of leaders of the ruling Labour Party in the CRC. And there is no uncertainty about that course. That course is the farther development of the programme of the National Party. If uncertainty does exist, it is certainly not as a result of a lack of communication and information from the side of the Government. My department has made a good deal of progress on that course by means of its preparations for that process, but we are still waiting for the group of leaders in the CRC to make use of this programme which has been offered. Here in my hand I have a report, a confidential report, which, admittedly, will not be tabled, on an investigation carried out at the request of my department by the Bureau for Economic Politics and Analysis of the University of Pretoria into the financial and fiscal matters of the future course spelt out to the CRC. It is a penetrating study, a matter which the Theron Commission, too, would certainly have investigated. This is an essential preparation of the course as the Government sees it, one on which there can be developments for the Coloured people. I can also inform hon. members that my department has progressed to the extent where it already has a report at its disposal, the so-called Senekal Report of the Public Service Commission, on the further development of the Administration of Coloured Affairs as the Public Service instrument of the CRC and its Executive. This much progress has already been made on this course.

This afternoon the hon. the Minister of Health and Planning informed this House candidly about what had lead to the dismissal of Mr. Sonny Leon as Chairman of the Executive, and for that reason I am not going to cover the same ground. But I want to add that on 20 October last year, after a meeting with the hon. the Prime Minister which lasted nearly a day, those gentlemen of the Executive gave the undertaking that they would study those proposals which they had had at their disposal for a long time, plus additional detailed aspects of those proposals. They wanted to discuss them with their national party executive first. However, nothing further has come of that. But if you were to ask me this afternoon whether this in fact meant, as the hon. member for Edenvale said and other hon. members suggested, that a checkmate situation existed at the moment, that there was a standstill, then I would say no, there was no standstill, because the door of my office is open to any leader of the Coloured population to come and have discussions at any time. The door of the hon. the Prime Minister is also open to them, and they know this. I believe, Mr. Speaker, that communication is necessary in these times in which we are living, and I make myself available for communication at all times with people who are prepared to communicate, to communicate sensibly and, in particular, to learn in the process as well. What matters in these times is understanding for each other, understanding for each other’s problems, understanding, also for other truths. The hon. member for Edenvale indicated this afternoon how the state of inflation which we were experiencing hit the non-White population groups of our country in particular, and I want to concede this. But it also hits the White community. It hits each and everyone. But, as the hon. member also said, we should try to get our priorities right. If we want to do this, i.e. to get our priorities right, then we should determine what the priorities are with a view to affecting the progress and advancement of the Coloured population of South Africa. Then I want to say in this regard that I believe that the Coloured population has a tremendous potential which can be used positively for our country and its development. I believe, furthermore, that from the side of the Government, as the set-up is at the present time, but also from the side of others, especially from the side of Coloured leaders, the Coloured population should be led and advised so as to be able to realize that potential which their population group has and, in the process, to make up the leeway which exists and which nobody wishes to deny. But at the same time I believe that in these days the emphasis should be on the positive, and that people will not impress me in this House by telling me that because of the situation in the CRC at the moment, a situation has now developed which can lead to tremendous tensions, etc. On the contrary, I believe, that a tremendous potential of goodwill exists between White and Brown people in this country. I believe at the same time that a sincere desire exists among responsible White and Brown leaders, and not only leaders, but also ordinary members of the public, to work out a workable system of co-existence and to strive positively for normal and sound relations with one another. Therefore, when the hon. the Leader of the Opposition says, as he did in his motion, that the Government has failed to improve race relations by making more rapid progress towards a system which will unite South Africans of all races in a common loyalty, then, as far as the Coloured population is concerned, whose future course runs parallel to that of the Whites, and who will continue to live in one geographical area with the Whites, I want to say that the hon. the Leader of the Opposition is mistaken, because during the past year my department has launched a unique undertaking, namely a system of relations committees on which Whites and Coloureds serve and which are being established in the larger towns and cities of our country. Coloureds will also be involved in these, of course. There will eventually be 80 or 90, of which 50 have already been established and are in operation. Sir, I have made it my personal responsibility during the past six months, since these committees started operating, to attend the first meetings of the most important of them when time permitted me to do so, I want to tell you today, Sir, that nowhere has there been any unpleasantness from the part of those relations committees. I was pleasantly surprised about this and this was my barometer for measuring the amount of goodwill which exists on the part of the Coloureds as well as the Whites to co-operate with one another sensibly and on a basis of non-confrontation. I believe this undertaking is a unique one in the world. In Britain a law was passed in 1968 to make racial tension and problems arising from racial relations punishable. But one cannot force people with such a law to like each other or to develop an understanding for each other and to live together in peace. For that reason I say that this dispensation of ours is a good and unique one.

The hon. Leader of the Opposition blames the Government for having failed to promote such relations. As far as this is concerned, the hon. the Leader of the Opposition is living in the dark. This undertaking is under way and evidence is being received from all sides that there is understanding for it. However, there are also obstreperous people. At the last congress of the Labour Party—it was reported in the Press—Mr. Leon instructed the members of the Labour Party not to serve on the relations committees. Fortunately there were sensible other views. Other leaders stood up and said they would not regard themselves as being bound by such a request or instruction. It was proved once again that there is willingness even within the ranks of the Labour Party to co-operate in this regard.

The fact that the hon. Leader of the Opposition may have been somewhat in the dark as far as this is concerned, reminds me of last year when the first of these committees was established and a press report appeared here which had originated in Oudtshoorn. Politicians, including the hon. member for Sea Point, whom unfortunately I do not see here now, were quick to comment on it. He said it was a good thing, but all that was wrong with this system of relations committees was that the leaders of the Coloured population were allegedly not consulted about or informed of this matter. The report appeared on 27 May last year, while we were in session. The fact is that this dispensation, which could only be launched last year, was announced by me here in this House as far back as 21 October 1974. Then the hon. member for Sea Point objected that nobody had known of it and that the leaders had not been informed. A further fact is that before I made the announcement, the executive of the CRC at that time was fully informed on the matter. They were not only fully informed; they all expressed their approval and they all expressed their gratitude for it. In other words, there are politicians who get excited too easily and who blame the Government for not doing anything to improve relations, but in the meantime they do not do their homework.

However, there is something else that interests me. The hon. the Minister of Health, of Planning and the Environment and of Statistics quoted this afternoon from a report submitted by the executive of the Labour Party to their congress. This was a public document. In this they say how powerful they are because the two public opposition parties consult them when a debate on the Coloured Affairs Vote is to take place here. They boast about this an say they are the tail that wags the dog because they tell those people what they should say. If the hon. members consult those people I have no fault to find with it. I am not concerned if the hon. member for Port Elizabeth Central consults them. He is also a member of the Erika Theron Commission. But what discussion takes place between the hon. member for Sea Point and his colleagues and the leaders of the Labour Party, who have pledged themselves to a course of confrontation with the Government? The hon. member for Sea Point took the lead, together with the local Press, The Cape Times, in condemning the steps taken by the Government to defend the borders of South Africa. When the Government took the necessary steps which it did take, harsh criticism was expressed. I find it quite a coincidence that Mr. Sonny Leon spoke the same language a few days later.

Fortunately I can say that there is a completely different attitude on this subject among the greater part of the Coloured population. I had the privilege of opening the Congress of the South African Coloured Legion in the vicinity of Cape Town on 2 January. That congress stated explicitly that as in the past, the Coloured population will not hesitate about what they are to do if South Africa’s safety is at stake. The hon. the Minister of Defence recently stated in the House that the Coloureds concerned with defence—i.e. the Cape Corps—had not only offered to do their share in defending the country, but had in fact already been involved.

I want to say something more to the hon. member for Sea Point. I do not mind discussions being held with people, but is it not necessary in these days for people to get their priorities straight? Does this not apply equally to people who wish to learn from our White politicians, as well as to others? Hon. members who regard the constitutional dispensation for the Coloureds as having come to a standstill, and who are obsessed by an image of unity which is presented of the Labour Party—one of confrontation—need only look at the newspapers. They should make an intensive study of the newspapers and also, if they can find this, of other information on what happened at the last congress of the Labourt Party in Kimberley. Apart from the question of participation in the defence of the country and the question of participation in relation committees, the point on which they disagreed most sharply amongst themselves was the question of co-operation with the Government on a course of development for the Coloureds. “Co-operation” does not mean that one should be a parrot, and that one should echo what I say or what my colleagues say. “Co-operation” means utilizing greater opportunities which arise from the freedom to state one’s own case the way one wants to. At that congress—and on previous occasions—one of the points on which opinions differed most sharply was in fact the question of utilizing the opportunities which exist. For that reason I am confident that there is enough goodwill among our Coloured population and, in fact, on the part of increasing number of Coloured people. Here I want to agree with the hon. member for Edenvale—they are becoming politically aware and they are becoming interested in the handling of their own affairs. There is enough goodwill on their part, and on the part of the Whites as well, to follow the splendid course that was outlined by the hon. the Prime Minister on 20 October last year. If there is enough goodwill among us all and if, during our discussions with this population group, we help to guide them and advise them to move in the direction of consultation, co-operation and joint endeavour, then a happy future awaits our country and especially that particular part of our population, the Coloured population of South Africa.

Mr. Speaker, I hope the hon. the Minister who has just spoken will not take it amiss if I do not react to what he said in his speech. He did, after all, make a speech which was, in a sense, a reply to speeches which had already been made by this side of the House. I understand that time is running against us and that one will have less time available than would normally be the case. I was very impressed by a portion of the speech of the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs when he spoke a day or two ago. In particular, I was impressed by a phrase he used. He said what had happened in Angola was a new Soviet offensive aimed at the complete take-over of Africa. That is a very serious statement indeed, and it is even more serious because I believe there is a very strong element of truth in it. I believe that it correctly states a danger which is before us at the present time. This is serious for South Africa, not merely because the threat exists, but it is the first time that we have actually had a Soviet presence on our borders; not only a Soviet presence, but an armed Soviet presence virtually on our borders. This is something that we have never had before. We have had the distant threat of the U.S.S.R., but it has been a remote threat and it has been cushioned, as it were, by the presence and, we believe, the willingness of the West to be a buffer between us and that threat. We have always had the nuisance of Communist ideology being motivated in South Africa, but we have, not had the physical threat in the sense that it now appears to be upon us. That being so, I believe we now have to rely for our future existence on a number of factors. Firstly, our own diplomacy, secondly the moral and physical strength of our own people, thirdly our own economic and industrial power and strength, fourthly our own military strength and, fifthly, the political cohesiveness of all our peoples in South Africa. As far as I can judge from the speeches of the hon. Minister of Foreign Affairs and the hon. Minister of Defence, and from other things one has read and heard in publications abroad, events seem to indicate that the five points I have mentioned correctly state our position. As far as the first is concerned, which is our own diplomacy which we have to rely on, I think the correct approach was that of the hon. member for Yeoville when he said that we should encourage something like a Monroe doctrine for Southern Africa, i.e. we should use our diplomatic resources not only to emphasize Southern Africa, but to bring about a realization amongst all the states of Southern Africa that any foreign interference from abroad in any country constitutes a threat to all. I believe we should build up a Southern African consciousness and a recognition that South Africa’s main function is to keep out foreign interference and to provide an environment in which all Southern African States can develop according to their own lights, even if they choose a Socialistic form of government.

The second point I made was the moral and physical strength of our own people. Angola and events there have shown that English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans must find themselves again, and Angola, properly guided, could give impetus to that direction.

What do you mean by that remark?

I mean that during the period of office of the Nationalist Party Government there has not been the progress in the direction of the two language groups finding themselves which I would wish to have taken place. I believe that today there is a greater preparedness on the part of the Government, and the Prime Minister particularly, to plead that that should take place, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It is not only words of encouragement that we require today. In this situation one wants to see it taking place. It must be an article of faith of a political party and a deep part of its philosophy as it has been in this political party for a generation or more. When I see, in the serried ranks of the Nationalist Party and its elected members, English speaking people elected as Nationalist Party members of Parliament, I will accept that progress has been made on that side of the House. I would like to see—I say this in all seriousness—the situation, in which we find ourselves, used to bring about a greater coming together of the English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking people. What South Africa needs at the head of affairs is a political party which gives frank and unconditional welcome to both the language groups of South Africa. As I have indicated, this Party, of which I am a member, needs no lessons in that regard. The Progressibe Party, on the other hand, could take some lessons in that regard. They always have been, and are still, largely representative of an exclusive group, namely the rich English urban areas of South Africa. They have always had, and have up to this stage, a strong anti-Afrikaans flavour in their midst.

You think they are Boer haters?

Quite. The next point I made, which I believe falls into this category, is the moral and physical strength of our people. What should be engendered in South Africa, when we are faced with threats such as we have at present, is the resolve to be strongly against those things which sap the moral fibre of the people to resist this type of onslaught. We must resist, and engender amongst our people a desire to resist, those things which dilute the accepted standard of belief and behaviour, which have been the hallmark of South African people, both English and Afrikaans, for so many generations What form does this onslaught take? It is not only a military onslaught. We know about that and we can face it. There is, however, a more subtle onslaught that goes with it. The history of communist incursion into the various parts of the world has demonstrated that to us. Firstly, there is the permissive society. There is the advent of communism as a guileless and well-intentioned intellectual movement which should be permitted. Thirdly, there is the question of drugs. There is a further factor which is engendered in South Africa, namely the attempt to engender the belief that the White man really has no place here, that he should be burdened with a sort of guilt complex because of his presence and his history here. I believe these are things which should be fought. The history of this Party in this House shows that these things have been fought. But they have been fought in the proper manner. I will say for the governing party that it has also fought these things, but we have had material differences of opinion with the Government on the methods which should be used to fight them. Communism is an example. But the Progressive Party is entirely on the outside, as far as this field is concerned. How many years have we been in this House with the hon. member for Houghton, hearing her plea, for example, that communism should be allowed to operate in South Africa.

I never pleaded anything of the kind. I do not believe in banning parties and organizations.

The hon. member for Houghton has adopted the standpoint that the Communist Party should be free to operate in South Africa provided it operates within the law.

Provided it operates within the law.

What a fatuous statement to make! No organization can operate in South Africa unless it operates within the law. That goes without saying. The danger of the Communist Party, however, is that it operates within the law in any country until such time that it is strong enough to overthrow the very system of law which allows it to operate. That is the whole danger of the thing, and that is why the United Party has been consistently of the opinion that that body should be controlled. Controlled through the courts, is our point of view.

It is banned.

How a political party can allow somebody like the hon. member for Yeoville, in a debate of this kind, to plead that his Party stands for the maintenance of law and order, when the history of the very Party he is pleading for is that communism—which is our main threat today with the Soviet presence on our borders—should be free to operate in South Africa, passes my understanding. I do not propose to go into detail on the questions of drugs, the permissive society and matters of that kind. I think I was able to demonstrate last year, by reference to chapter and verse, the standing of the Progressive Party in that regard.

Let us come to the next point. The next point I want to make is that we will have to rely on our own economic and industrial strength. That means three things, so far as I can see: It means we have to combat inflation—I shall not go into the details of that because it has been dealt with—principally by increasing productivity, through which we shall not only combat inflation but provide the wherewithal to defend ourselves in a situation where we find ourselves largely alone; secondly, we have to exploit all our natural resources; and, thirdly, we have to use our manpower to the full. I believe we are going to be driven to this, whether we like it or not. What does this mean in every-day terms? We are calling up Active Citizen Force units at the present time, and we are increasing the period of training for those who are called up to do their training. If these threats to the north continue, there will be an extension of the calling up of man-power. That goes without saying. This will take young White men out of active employment in commerce and industry, and on our farms, at the most active time of their lives. They are mostly skilled, because today most White men are skilled. In a time of inflation, and in a time when there is an acute shortage of skilled people, they will to an increasing extent be taken out of our industrial machine in order to serve their country in a different form. We will not be able to leave a vacuum, where those men have been taken; we will have to put others in their place to keep the industrial machine going in order to provide us with the security we demand in this respect. The people who have to take their place will be non-Whites. They will have to be trained by means of the very crash programme which the hon. the Leader of the Opposition has so frequently pleaded for and which has been laughed at by that side of the House. These people will be trained in skilled and semi-skilled jobs and will move rapidly up the economic scale in jobs that were formely held down by Whites. That is the first thing that will happen, and it will happen almost immediately, not in the distant future. It will happen willy-nilly. The next step is that these people will live permanently in the urban areas where the industries are situated. Consequently physical planning and job reservation will have to be scrapped. Where people are permanently living and doing skilled and semi-skilled work, one will have to build houses and schools. One will also have to provide training facilities, technical schools, universities and recreational facilities where they are living and working, i.e. in the urban areas and industrialized areas of South Africa. Having done that, one will be driven to accept their permanence there and, having done that, one will have to provide in some way for them to have a voice in the community in which they live.

Why “in some way”? Why not in full?

I am sorry, I do not have much time. There will be a further side-effect to this. With this type of development, which is imminent to those in this House who see what is taking place, one will find less and less desire on the part of the remaining homelands to take their independence. Faced with that situation, one will be driven to seek a formula to provide for the aspirations of these people in South Africa itself. I believe that if one faces the realities of the situation, this is what we are faced with in South Africa at the present time.

As I have said, we have to rely on our own military strength. The hon. member for Durban Point has dealt with that fully, and I shall not deal with it again. The lesson seems to be that a small well-trained unit can go a long way in the warfare of Africa today.

Finally, one comes to the question of the political cohesiveness of all our people. I think it is trite to say that an army in the field is only as strong as the industry which supports it and the political machine which directs it. I think Britain and France, in the Second World War, are classic examples of this. France had the biggest army in Europe at the time. That army was well equipped and it had an industrial machine to back it. However, it lacked a Government that had the support of the people and that had, in itself, the inherent desire to prosecute the war. Despite the enormous military might of France, France collapsed. Great Britain was the opposite. Great Britain under Churchill had a tremendous desire to prosecute the war, and the will was there, but it did not have the industrial machine to provide it with the necessary tools, and but for the advent of America with its aid, it may well be that Britain would not have survived. As I have indicated, we are entering a phase, in South Africa, where the Whites are being taken up into the armed forces. Heaven forbid that it should happen, but if events to the north of us were to escalate, this would proceed apace and the non-Whites would be brought in. I tried to indicate that the non-Whites would acquire a permanence that would bring about the changes and a desire to find a formula that could accommodate his presence in the White areas.

All this would be happening at a time when the Government has proclaimed that it is the policy of the Government to do away with discrimination. I should like to say just a word or two, in the five minutes left to me, on the question of discrimination and the sharing of power. All three political parties believe that discrimination should be got rid of. They have that goal. However, there are differences between the parties in this respect. I am not sure that all the members of the Government believe that discrimination should be done away with. I think, for example, of the hon. member who is now the Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration and Education. Everything he has said in the past indicates that he believes that discriminatory measures are an inherent part of the policy of separate development. I have yet to hear him go along with the Government’s declared policy that that is no longer the case. The United Party’s standpoint in this regard is quite clear and simple, and it goes back to our early publications of 1961. We said then that there should be a review of all discriminatory measures with a view to discarding all that was unnecessary and hurtful. That is what we said in our policy statement of 1961.

You had better give a definition of discrimination.

Our goal today is that discriminatory measures should be done away with. I think everybody in this House, except the Progrefs, will realize that one cannot do this overnight. One is dealing with people and, whereas some things can be done immediately, some will take a little longer. The problem I have with the Progrefs is that they state it as their declared aim that discriminatory measures must be done away with, but according to them these measures must be done away with immediately, all of them. However, when one presents them—as was done with the swimming bath at Windsor—with the implementation of their declared policy, they are the first people to throw up their hands in horror and try to hide behind the screen of “Swart gevaar’’

That is absolutely untrue.

On the other hand, one also finds them reverting to the point of view of the United Party which is that these things will take time. We have heard so much about double-talk when those hon. gentlemen left us and formed their own party: They were going to nail their colours to the mast; there was to be no more double-talk. Then the first thing we heard was in regard to this question of racial discrimination.

Let us talk about the sharing of political power. Both the Nationalists and ourselves believe in the sharing of power. They constantly talk against it, but their policy is one of sharing of power. It is a sharing of power on a geographic basis.

But the weakness of the policy is that it shares power with only a minority of the Black people of South Africa, those who happen to be permanently living in the homelands, while it does not share power with the Black people who live outside the homelands. It is, consequently, no real sharing of power at all. The federal policy of the United Party provides for a genuine sharing of power in respect of all the Black people of South Africa.

Let me now touch on my friends of the Progressive Party—the Progressive Reform Party, as they call themselves today. They constantly say—and this is another aspect of the double talk that we constantly get from that quarter—that they are against domination of one racial group by another, that they stand for a sharing of power. But in reality they do neither. What does sharing of power mean? It means giving the Black man a share of power, but it also means that the White man shall retain a share of power, and influence. Otherwise it is not sharing.

While pleading for sharing and being against domination, they institute a policy which, incidentally, we have never heard espoused in this House yet—neither the previous one, nor the present one. They stress that they share power and they state that they are against domination, but they bring in a franchise and a constitutional proposal which brings about either immediate, or almost immediate, Black majority rule in unitary institutions at every level of government—at the level of the Johannesburg city council, at the level of provincial administration and at the level of the central Parliament. There is no sharing with them; it is a surrender of the influences and the rights—the political rights—of the White man in South Africa and of all other minority groups. [Interjections.]

Sir, I am going to make a prediction. The Progressive Party, before the advent of the Reformists, has during the whole time they have been in this House since the election two years ago—you are all witnesses—never once debated the policy of the old Progressive Party. And now they have a new policy, well to the left of their old political policy. I want to make another prediction. Before the coming Durban-North by-election we shall not hear it debated in this House, not even once and I am very doubtful as to whether we shall hear it debated thereafter.

Mr. Speaker, there are other things I would have wished to say in this debate, but I am afraid my time has expired.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Umhlatuzana will understand in the course of my speech why I do not want to reply to his speech at this stage. Because certain things have been said here in connection with a department in which I was privileged to serve, I consider it my duty to reply in greater detail to what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition alleged in his motion in this regard.

In the course of this debate up to now there has been repeated reference to “dangerous times” and “very dangerous times”. These words are well-founded, and I appreciate the fact that people realize the seriousness of the situation in which we find ourselves in South Africa at the moment. It is a situation which has been forced upon us, a situation which was probably not fully foreseen by anyone in South Africa or in the outside world, and which is now giving rise to various reactions.

Of the reactions which we are able to distinguish, I should like to mention the three most important ones and to express a few thoughts about each of them. In the first place there is the reaction of panic. There were people who were panic-stricken and people—and this one can understand—who were concerned. However, there were people who went further, who sowed the seeds of despair in the minds of others and who tried to fish in troubled waters. There is a group of people which is creating suspicion about the actions of this Government in the minds of people in South West Africa, and I am not referring specifically to the Progressives or to the United Party. These people have started to circulate their pamphlets here in South Africa as well. I find it necessary to issue a clear warning to the Herstigte Nasionale Party—some people refer to them as Hertzogites, but I do not wish to associate the name of the late Gen. Hertzog with that name—and to others who support their way of thought, even in this House, that there is no sympathy with a party in this country which still believes in the oppression of Black races, of people of a different colour, and who engage in agitation which can only lead to hate and bitterness. If there are people who help to sow the seeds of panic and of suspicion, and if those things are beginning to crop up in this House as well, we ought to take serious stock of what we are doing.

There are people who have participated in this debate in a responsible manner. On the other hand, however, there are people who have been prepared to engage in political point-scoring in these troubled times, people who, in referring to what they had just called a crisis situation, have tried with platitudes and old clichés to pass this off as a situation that can be joked about, a situation about which meaningless discussions can be held, supported by obsolete arguments.

In the third place, fortunately, there have been those speeches, including several by members on the other side of the House, but in particular by members on this side of the House, which testified to a clear realization of the seriousness of the times in which we live, but also to faith in the future, a realistic understanding of and approach to the present circumstances, as well as an optimistic attitude and an acceptance of the fact that one still has a task to perform under these circumstances.

To those who are sowing the seeds of panic, and to those who may be feeling worried and particularly to our people outside, who in these times are being incited from various sides with the idea that we have come to the end of the road, I want to say here today that it is true that we are living in very dangerous times indeed. However, this nation has lived in very dangerous times before, but we have not only survived every time; time and again we have emerged stronger than before. People who are prepared to face their task and to work can continue in the belief that they will emerge from the situation stronger than before.

I now want to address the hon. the Leader of the Opposition in particular. I do not know whether he was in the House at the time, but I know the hon. member for Brits, who is sitting in front of me, will still remember this. I am referring to the year 1947, and allow me to add at once that I do not want to rake up old stories, nor do I wish to expose an old party and its faults again. I am only stating facts. On 21 January 1947 the late Dr. D. F. Malan, at that time Leader of the Opposition in this House, moved a motion of no confidence in the Government. On that occasion the words “dangerous”, “extremely dangerous” and “crisis” appeared in his speech as well. I want to say in all humility to our new members that if ever one wants to read something which reflects the history of our country, the House of Assembly debates of 1947 and immediately afterwards are really indispensable. With reference to the discussions which had taken place at the U.N., Dr. Malan said on that occasion (Hansard, Vol. 59, col. 10894)—

This was said by the then Leader of the Opposition. But what did the then Prime Minister say? I shall read you a brief extract (Hansard, Vol. 59, col. 10911)—

In col. 10920 he reported on what he had said there. He said—

Further on in the column he said the following—

This is what was said by Gen. Smuts, the then Prime Minister of South Africa, i.e. that we were the spear point. How true it has remained up to this very day that we are the spear point, and because this is so, we are made into the scapegoat for everything that happens in the world. That is what I say to people who want to get panic-stricken today: We have seen evil times before; we have had these difficulties before. There are people on the other side who said that it was this Government’s policy that had brought us riots. I am not making any reproaches, I am merely stating facts. On that day the late Mr. Eric Louw also entered the debate. As a member of the Opposition he said that the non-Whites were overjoyed. The hon. member for Green Point and others who were living in Cape Town at the time may remember this and will be able to tell whether it is true or not. He proceeded to say (col. 10939)—

Once again today there is talk here of bloodshed and of internal unrest. Let us look now at the report which appeared in The Argus on that day—

Mrs. Z. Gool said—

That was many years ago. But those things happened and we survived them, because this nation will survive anything if it has the will to do so. We have had other black times in our history, but we are inclined to forget them all too soon. In South West an innocent mother and her child have been killed. But have we forgotten that Rentia Vermeulen was killed in the streets of Paarl in 1962? Have we forgotten that there was a Sharpeville, have we forgotten the march on this Parliament and the people who fled from this country? Are we to lose our faith and succumb to fear? We can sometimes be too serious and too panicky about these things. I am not saying that we should adopt a frivolous attitude towards them. In these times I really cannot laugh about things such as these. They are serious enough if we mean well with those boys who died on the border, and if we want to ensure that they have not died in vain, we must approach the problems with which we are faced in a serious frame of mind.

However, there are positive things as well today, things to be grateful for. In the first place I want to say to those on this side of the House in particular, to us who have to back up the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, that—perhaps this is not known to the members on the other side and the members of the Progressive Reform Party—the Bantu newspaper The World, which is circulated in Soweto and those places, has made a survey of the popularity or otherwise of the Prime Minister. This newspaper is certainly not sympathetically disposed towards the Government. Fifty-two per cent of those who expressed their opinions declared themselves to be completely satisfied with his leadership over all of South Africa, including the Black people of South Africa. [Interjections.] The hon. member for Houghton need not be jealous. She might have drawn more votes in those parts; I concede that. I think any South African may be proud of the fact that his Prime Minister, who is not only a member of the National Party, but who represents South Africa, is so highly esteemed in the world and in its own country, even if such a person disagrees with the Prime Minister’s views. For my part, I was able to feel this way about Gen. Smuts, even though our opinions were diametrically opposed.

There are still more encouraging signs. Shall I mention them all? The attitude of Malawi and of the 22 other countries who used to adopt a different attitude. There are people who say that we boast of this but that these countries have not given us their full support yet. Of course they do not fully agree with us, but at least their attitude is no longer as hostile as it used to be. There are encouraging signs, Sir, and we have reason to be grateful for them. There has come to be understanding for us in the world. At the end of 1974, when the Prime Minister made his famous speech at Nigel, when he asked for South Africa to be given a chance, he also said that he believed and predicted that there would be a change in the attitudes of Australia and of New Zealand. In those years they were our greatest enemies. He was right and we have reason to be grateful for the fact that things have turned out so well for us in that respect. Is it not the duty of everyone who has South Africa and its interests at heart and who believes that we have a future here to be grateful for the good things that have happened?

The hon. member for Bezuidenhout spoke of South West Africa. I do not want to speak on that subject because I know too little about the circumstances. I think the situation is dangerous enough to make it better for those of us who do not know anything about it not to take part in the debate. I just want to ask the hon. member for Bezuidenhout, before he speaks on South West Africa again, to read what was said in column 10915 of Hansard of 21 January 1947 by the then Prime Minister, Gen. Smuts. He said—

Now I hear people say on the other side of the House: We must have a referendum in South West Africa to hear what those people say. Have you forgotten that a referendum was held among all the population groups of South West Africa in which the inhabitants decided by an overwhelming majority that they wanted to be integrated with South Africa? The world would not accept it. Are we now to run the matter into a farce? Do you in the Opposition benches think that the world will accept you? Do you think that times have changed and that if the United Party were to come into power the world would withdraw its threats? Then they have learned nothing from history and it is no use my talking. Does the Progressive Reform Party think that Black Africa would accept their policy? Is there a single person in South Africa who is naive enough to believe that concessions of that kind, which are not founded on conviction, would gain the world’s sympathy?

I said that I would reply briefly to what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition said concerning the delay in the development of the country if we do not proceed with the training of Bantu at certain centres. I fully agree with him, but I should like to be of assistance to him, even though I have left the department, by providing him with the figures, for the figures he quoted are quite wrong, and I am very sorry to say this to the leader of the Opposition. I like reading his speeches because his arguments are always well-founded. However, when the Leader of the Opposition speaks of a few centres that have not started to function, I want to tell him that it is not yet 1980. And four of the centres that were promised last year are already functioning. Another four will be completed during this year. Then eight will be functioning. Within a year’s time, three of the other ten centres have already been finished and the other seven will start functioning before the end of this year. I do not want to go into this in detail, but there have already been applications from 800 industrialists who want to give on-the-floor training. More than 300 have already been registered and they are doing splendid work.

By the year …

If the hon. the Leader of the Opposition wants to ask why we have not been doing this since 1960 I want to tell him that we are living in dangerous times and that we do not have time to argue about those things. I am talking of what we are doing now and of what we intend to do in the years ahead.

Last year—and I thank the hon. member for Berea who made suggestions in this regard in a field where we can co-operate—we began a section for adult training in the educational department. This section was introduced in order to give those who were deprived of this privilege an opportunity to receive academic training. We have now started training Bantu. But now allegations are made on the other side of the House that we have neglected Bantu education. Perhaps it was neglected for a very long time; I do not know. However, the National Party took this education department under its wing and it has been a privilege to me to co-operate with the people of the Departments of Bantu Affairs and Administration and of Bantu Education. I know of no other department or group of officials which is subjected to more unnecessary and undeserved vilification. I know of no department where greater sacrifices are made. I have seen some of these people in the homelands and there are some of them in Owambo at the moment under the present circumstances. As far as the Department of Education is concerned, 3 800 000 pupils enrolled in 1975, in spite of the circumstances. This year 4 050 000 have enrolled. My colleague has pointed out that this represents 21% of the total population.

Complaints were made about secondary training. To this I can reply that within a period of two years there has been an increase of 140% on the secondary level of Bantu education, and this in spite of all the difficulties with teachers. My hon. friend on the other side of the House referred to the standard of Bantu education. The standard is fully equal to the standard set for White children. However, the moment that some of them fail because they have not been able to attain the standard it is said that we are discriminating against the Bantu children because we are failing too many of them and the next moment, when we pass them, it is said that they are given an inferior certificate.

These then are the positive things we do. The hon. Leader spoke of job reservation. He said: “I believe there is still job reservation and we must do away with it. ’’

†I can tell the hon. the Leader of the Opposition that there is still job reservation and that it will remain. But, Sir, is it news to you that job reservation affects only 2,9% of the labour force? [Interjections.] We can phase that out. It is something which is being done with the consent and co-operation of the parties concerned. This is exactly what the hon. the Leader of the Opposition suggested in his speech. He said that we had to phase this out, taking into consideration our labour pattern, and that is what we are doing.

To conclude I should like to say that I think we must appreciate the work that has been done over the past number of years.

*However, we shall have to obtain the co-operation of the public of South Africa. This cannot come from the Government only. We also have to say frankly to our Bantu population that there are three parties cooperating in this regard. The Government is doing its share and so are the employers. I want to thank the employers for their cooperation in regard to the training centres. But we must realize that we can no longer tell the Bantu that they can have everything for nothing. We must encourage them to contribute their share as well and thus to develop a pride of their own.

As in the case of my hon. friend, the new Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration and Education, there were people who said at the time of my appointment as well: “What he knows of Bantu Affairs you can put in your one eye.’’ Sir, this is the kind of welcome he will get. As far as I am concerned, I stand by my colleague and I shall help him as far as I can, because I know that he is competent to fill the post and because I know that he takes it seriously. I know that it will be reciprocal. We have only one loyalty. A Deputy Minister or a Minister, a member of the House of Assembly or an ordinary member of the party, we have only one leader. There is no question of different leaders and of chopping and changing. We have one leader and that is our hon. Prime Minister. I want to repeat what he has said before: If you want to have the joy of helping us build, then you can—along with the Prime Minister.

†The hon. member for Pinelands said: “There are no White South Africans.”

I said there was no White South Africa.

I am sorry and apologize. The hon. member said that there was no White South Africa. I can assure the hon. member that there is a White South Africa and that there always will be. We will see to it that there will always be a White South Africa.

There is only one South Africa.

Yes, geographically there is only one South Africa, one southern Africa and one Africa, but there are Egyptians in Egypt and White South Africans in South Africa.

To conclude, I would like to read out to the hon. member for Hillbrow what the attitude is of some of the members on that side of the House, including his. He said: “Last year our men were fighting; they are fighting now and many more of us will be required to fight in future. Speaking for myself and, I believe, for most South Africans, I should like to say that I do not want to fight to uphold apartheid and for the Immorality Act, the Group Areas Act and border industries. However, give something to our people that is worth fighting for.’’ If the hon. member does not want to fight, he can keep out of it. And let him stay out of it. [Interjections.] I know he fought in the war. But if this is his attitude, we will fight alone and survive.

Mr. Speaker, if my time were not as limited as it is, I would have liked to reply in detail to the somewhat intemperate and inaccurate comments made by the hon. member for Umhlatuzana about the Progressive Party. As it is, however, I shall say only one or two things about that speech. The hon. member said that I pleaded in this House for the existence of the Communist Party in South Africa. That is not true. I said that I did not agree with banning parties or organizations by executive action. What the hon. member said here today boils down to exactly the same thing. He says that he wants the Communist Party to be controlled by the courts, and so do we. If the Communist Party should take any action which is subversive, it would feel the full weight of the laws against it under a Progressive Reform Party Government. I must point out to this lawyer that the Communist Party is not banned by the courts in South Africa, but by executive action. And it is that to which we object.

The second statement which the hon. member has made and which was quite inaccurate is that the Progressive Reform Party’s policy has never been expounded in this House.

I did not say that.

Yes, indeed, you did say that. I will give the hon. member a reference where the policy was expounded in absolute detail by the leader of this party. He will find it in col. 1261, Vol. 59 of 1975. I do not have the time to repeat the principles enunciated by him at that time. The real trouble is that the hon. member for Umhlatuzana is suffering from a recurrent disease, namely by-election jitters. I do not blame him because in the last year or so he has had some very traumatic experiences.

I would now like to come to my old friend, Deputy Minister Janson, who has sadly been parted from the portfolio of Bantu Administration. I am very sad because the hon. the Deputy Minister has left the portfolio because I enjoyed my discussions with him across the floor of the House very much. I must also say that I was always able to visit the hon. gentleman and put cases to him. [Interjections.]

I cannot say that we always came to an agreement on those occasions, but I shall miss him. I believe that 1976 has had a very inauspicious beginning with the replacement of himself and his fellow-Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration by two superverkramptes. I must say that I am not really surprised at that, because I knew that the poor old Deputy Minister was for the chop. Last year when the hon. the Minister of Bantu Administration sat almost opposite me, one had only to look at the agonized expression on his face whenever the hon. Deputy Minister Janson made one of his verligte speeches to realize this. Agony is the only way in which I can describe it. I knew that the poor gentleman was for the chop, but I wish him well in his new portfolio and I am very sad indeed about his replacement. I was upset to hear our new hon. Deputy Minister defending the quality of Bantu education. I was hoping that my fears would have been allayed by his maiden speech as Deputy Minister, but not at all. The hon. Deputy Minister defends a system where not 2% of the African children at school reach Matric; he defends a system where 60% of the children leave school after passing Std. 2 and he defends a system where R28 per capita is spent on an African child as against something like R480 per annum on a White child. How can he possibly compare the quality of education given to White children with the quality of education given to Black children? I have very limited time and I want to get on to the subject which I intended to speak on.

We have listened for the last four days to a great deal of discussion on the very important issue of South Africa’s involvement in Angola. Many questions have been posed, the key question being posed by my hon. leader, and that was: Was South Africa in fact involved in the civil war in Angola? To that key question no reply has been forthcoming from any member on the Government side. Like Brer Rabbit, the Government has laid low and said absolutely nothing on this subject. I must say that this atypical reticence on the part of a Government that we are used to hearing braying loudly about all its actions, can only lead to one conclusion, and that is that the other charge made by my hon. leader, namely that our involvement in Angola was a grave error, could only have been true. There could be no reason for the reticence otherwise. After all, everybody knew that we were in Angola. Our soldiers who returned talked about where they had been in Angola. I had parents ’phoning me and telling me that their sons had been hundreds of kilometres inside Angola and they wanted to know if the Government had the right to send them there. We have, unfortunately, had some of our soldiers captured hundreds of kilometres inside Angola, there have been news reports from overseas which have made it clear that our troops have been seen hundreds of kilometres inside Angola, and now there are news reports that we are withdrawing from those positions. Why the reticence? The Government’s failure to come clean with this Parliament and with the country is going to hang like a dark cloud over the Government for all time to come, because truth will out, and when it is revealed this Government is going to look remarkably stupid. [Interjections.]

In dangerous times, silence is a very good argument.

No, not when it is obvious that the Government is talking nonsense and not disclosing the truth. This can only mean that the Government knows that it has made an error of judgment about Angola, and I believe it was an important error because it has—as other hon. members have mentioned—destroyed our whole argument and the whole basis of our policy of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries. I want to say quite unequivocally that it has also meant that other countries can use this as an excuse to intervene, not only in South West Africa, but also in South Africa’s affairs. Therefore, in those circumstances, it may very well be necessary to spend more money on defence, and “defence” is the operative word. I want to say emphatically, however, that it would be quite mad for this country to divert one cent from any of the essential expenditure which could help to halt the deteriorating racial position inside South Africa, because that expenditure inside South Africa is also a part of defence in the widest sense of the term. You can give our men at the border the most modern, sophisticated weapons and they will be as effective as bows and arrows if behind them, inside South Africa, there is a growing ground-swell of discontent amongst 80% of the population. I believe that if financial sacrifices are going to have to be made in the interests of obtaining modern military hardware, those sacrifices should be made by the White population, those who can afford it, and not by cutting back on essential expenditure at home for the Black population in South Africa.

I would say that the error of judgment over Angola is by no means the Government’s first error in handling the strategy of Southern Africa. Over all these years it has allowed the Russians, the communists, to obtain the monopoly of identification with the fight against colonialism, and by its own foolishness in always equating the struggle to remove race discrimination, with communism, it has given an aura of respectability to communism in the eyes of Black Africa. It is an extremely stupid thing to have been allowed to happen. I think of the foolish way in which the Government ignored the moderate message of the Lusaka Manifesto of 1969. We have lost nearly six valuable years, which could have been spent in making South Africa acceptable as a friendly State by Black Africa. Today we have a whole new ball game. We have lost those cosy buffer States of Angola and Mozambique and the viability of White Rhodesia is very much in question. I believe that an overwhelming sense of urgency now pervades the scene in Southern Africa as far as we are concerned. It is depressing that many White South Africans and this Government do not realize how urgent it is to do something about dismantling the whole apparatus of apartheid in order to win the Black population onto our side, against aggression from outside and to alienate them from terrorism inside South Africa. I think that it is just as important to create a climate in which our potential allies from outside South Africa will not find it impossible to be with us, will no longer have to shun us, because they would be identified with what is known as a White rascist Government in South Africa. I do not go along with the optimistic member for Von Brandis, who said in an interview the other day that the next 25 years are going to be the most critical years for South Africa. I believe that the next one or two years are going to be the most critical for South Africa. Every week that passes without our making significant progress as far as racial rapprochement at home is concerned, compounds the danger that confronts us. If the measures that were taken in 1975, which was the year of great expectations in the racial field, are a yardstick of progress, then I tremble for the future of this country. It is 15 months since Mr. Pik Botha made his statement at the United Nations about South Africa intention to remove race discrimination. It is well over a year since the hon. the Prime Minister made his famous “Give us six months” speech. A year has passed since the hon. the Prime Minister promised the homeland leaders that he would implement important changes for the urban Africans. Nine months have passed since the hon. the Minister of Bantu Administration made the statement under his Vote that the Government was in earnest about dismantling some of the trappings, anyway, of apartheid.

In short, I believe that the year of 1975, which was a year of great expectations, was a let-down for the Africans in South Africa and for the Black people as a whole. I shall be reminded about petty apartheid, of the removal of “Whites only” notices, the Nico Malan desegregation, that de luxe train desegregation, desegregation of some of the hotels and so on. None of these things mean a row of beans to people who live in an open society. It does not mean a thing to them. They laugh at you when you present these as examples of desegregation, of the dismantling of apartheid. Even sport is not considered important by them because they live in an open society and are used to mixed sport. They do not consider it a very important thing, and 98% of the Black population of this country does not care at all. What has happened? The Coloured community is in turmoil. The CRC has been prorogued sine die. The whole of the executive has resigned. What has happened in the last important year as far as the Africans are concerned? The three great problems the Government promised to do something about remain fundamentally unchanged. One was to narrow the wage gap between Blacks and Whites. What wage increases there have been for Blacks, have been swallowed up into the maw of inflation. How on earth the average Black person manages to exist today—the unskilled Black worker in particular—is beyond me. The pass laws, which are the greatest source of racial friction in the country, and which accounted for over half a million convictions last year, are still virtually untouched. We await action by the Government’s administrative committee of inquiry. There is a desperate housing shortage in the urban areas. Last year I warned about the dangerous position in Soweto. What has happened? 18 000 people are still awaiting houses in Soweto. In Cape Town, at Crossroads, something like 8 000 people are living in conditions of squalor. Many of those people qualify to be in the Cape area, and yet not a single house, I am told, is on the drawing-board in the Cape for Nyanga, Langa or Guguletu. Hundreds of men qualify under section 1(b) to have their wives and dependants with them, but they are living in bachelor quarters and because they are paying rent for bachelor quarters they are not even allowed to put their names on a waiting-list for houses.

One significant concession which Africans did obtain, the 30 year leasehold, has turned into a bitter pill that sticks in their gullets. When the hon. the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development made his statement in this House last year—a most welcome statement—that he was going to reinstate the 30 year lease system, he made no mention of the miserable conditions that were going to accompany the granting of the 30 years lease. He made no mention of conditions other than the fact that people had to qualify in terms of section 10(1), had to have dependants and had to be in employment when he spoke over the radio later. Spurred on by the Minister’s original announcement, all sorts of exciting schemes were undertaken. Investigations were begun on all sorts of home improvement schemes for Soweto. Now the big concession that the Africans did value, the concession made in 1975, has been turned into an instrument of blackmail to make the Africans take out citizenship in the homelands. I think it is disgusting. That is the only way I can express my feelings about the conditions that have been laid down. There is not only this shocking condition that has been laid down; there is also the cut-back in Bantu education. I wonder if the present or past Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration and Education agrees that there should be a cut-back in that most vital portfolio of Bantu Education, on which the whole future productivity of this country depends. There is a cut-back on Bantu education but a continuation, mark you, of many of the resettlement and removal schemes.

There is another thing which the Blacks resent and that is the closing of the Natal Black medical school. Why on earth the Government has to do this, at this stage, is absolutely beyond me. We do not need to close down that school, we need another medical school. That is what we need. We need that school to be maintained and the opening of another medical school.

I say that this year of great expectations, 1975, has turned out to be a most bitter disappointment, and now, if I could only infuse some sense of urgency into this House and into the Government which is responsible for the changes that have to come about, I would at least have served a purpose in taking part in this debate. Tomorrow, when the hon. the Prime Minister enters this debate, I can only hope that some of the answers that we have been pressing for about the Angolan situation, which the hon. the Minister of Defence has carefully skirted around, and the hon. the Minister of Foreign Affairs has most carefully avoided, will at least be tackled by the hon. the Prime Minister when he replies to the debate tomorrow afternoon.